Turning 80 and no Longer Counting

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung October 3, 2024.

I have ceased grasping at turning 80 on October 12th. It is a fact to accept and nurture for what wisdom may develop from this crossing. Many of you have made the pilgrimage this far and have felt the changes that attend it.  

What a moment to take stock, to ask some basic questions as I look back at a life that feels very full, meaningful and nourishing. With it arises areas of reflection that feel most crucial to entertain now.

I find in looking back that I was less in pursuit of happiness, more in pursuit of meaning and purpose. Certainly, biology is front and center, but more importantly are matters of soul that shape my identity.  For in a reflective life meaning is always expanding; when it’s not, perhaps it signals a time to question and perhaps to abandon worn out patterns of thought and behavior.

I find that I am less invested in life’s clarity and more attuned to life’s mystery within each day. I like the word “enchantment” to convey this feeling of renewal. I also have slipped out of the harness of regretting the past and anticipating the future. I have traded those out for a deeper sense of awakening to the present moment.

I no longer strive for a sense of prestige and importance, but by a will to wisdom. It allows for responding to life, not reacting to it.

Here are a series of questions I want to contemplate further:

What have I been and am now in service of?

What sections of my life have I shirked responsibility for?

What wounds do I still carry from childhood and young adulthood as they shorten and narrow life’s possibilities?

What calls to me now as I saunter across the 80 threshold?

How many choices in my life were made by others and not me?

Have I followed story lines that were foisted on me by others or the society I live within?

Did I yield to them while pretending they were my own?

As one who believes that we all contain both a conscious and an unconscious, I wonder what remains beneath the floorboard of consciousness that is pushing up from below to be heard and seen?

My psychologist friend, James Hollis, suggests that all of us lack a deep sense of permission to lead our own lives. What have I not allowed myself to create that would deepen my sense of Self?

In my spiritual life, am I still living within a framework that is woefully outdated? Have I pursued a deepening relationship with the divine, the sacred and the sacrosanct that provides guidance every day if I am willing to allow it?

What have I used or abused in my life that medicated me such that I was insensitive to the voices of the soul that clamor for attention that could benefit me and through me, to others?

As a teacher of 60 years, did I use my subject matter to deepen and enlarge my own vocation into a more creative life and to share it with my students?

Where do I feel a sense of urgency, of something that is calling now, perhaps for the first time that I am morally obligated to ponder and activate?

What gives me joy, pleasure, and delight in being alive?

I end on a poetic note. One of my favorite poets, Rumi (1207-1273) was born in Afghanistan. In one poem he writes: “Be silent now. /Say fewer and fewer praise poems/Let yourself become living poetry.” The last line expresses how I have continued to live most fully.

The Sacred Ordinary

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung September 6, 2024

In my habit of journaling each morning, I used to recall the day before and the Big Events that shaped it. Over time, however, I found more intriguing musing with my pen about the ordinary events that infiltrated yesterday’s unfolding: the smile from a stranger in passing; the moment a driver gave me a break in heavy traffic; the kindness of a person who saw I dropped something and retrieved it for me; the smiling sliver of a bright moon against a dark, starry sky; the way our cat Ginger climbs up on our bed and cuddles with my wife and me.

What is most glorious about shifting our imaginations from the big, the one time only event, to the small that may repeat itself often—is that there is so much more of the ordinary than anything else. But often we don’t pause long enough to notice, much less appreciate, these incidentals.

Certainly, a different program of perception structures our noticing the ordinary. It does not need us for it to happen; every day the ordinary, the mundane goes on without us. Sure, some of this new interest may increase as we age. Perhaps it is in slowing down; yet it is available to anyone curious about the way things are, how they unfold, and what may make ordinary events even sacred as divine gifts.

My curiosity was piqued recently when I found two books on my shelf I had read parts of years ago. The first one is The Sacrament of the Present Moment by a Catholic priest, Jean-Pierre De Caussade (1675-1751) who lived in southern France. For many it became a classic of Christian devotion, but it exists for anyone who senses mystery in the ordinary.

He wrote: “the only condition necessary for this state of self-surrender is the present moment in which the soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every moment of grace like a floating balloon.” He believed that when we pay attention to these ordinary occurrences of life, that who we truly are can surface.

The second book by a much more contemporary author and teacher Lynda Sexson is Ordinarily Sacred. There she offers that “intrusions of the mundane become agents of the sublime,” a word we don’t hear very often in our consumer-oriented culture.

Fond of using metaphors to reveal a truth that rational or literal language cannot express as well, she crafted this rich image: “The sacred is the leopard lying in wait--the shock of its sudden appearance. Perhaps one of the most startling places the leopard can appear is among the ephemeral nonsense that distracts us into metaphor.”

Using metaphorical language is commonplace in all of our communications. If we listen to individuals telling one another their stories, often about ordinary commonplace occurrences, we hear their expressions abundant with metaphors. Without metaphors, we don’t have an interesting story. Metaphors can transform the ordinary into a compelling incident.

Ordinary moments can provide the context we need, even desire, to “discover or rediscover, one’s world view, one’s depth” writes Sexson, but it can be buried under life’s busyness. However, for both writers, paying attention to what usually goes unnoticed, we can discover where the subline resides--in the ordinary.

I end with a question for you: what did you notice yesterday as you carried out your obligations, meetings, and tasks that claimed you? What rises to your mind as you remember? Think small here, ordinary, what largely remains unnoticed. The sacred ordinary may surprise you.

The Haunting Ghost of Imperfection

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, weekend edition, August 24-25, 2024.

Over the years I have conducted workshops on body and psychic woundedness, personal boundaries and the life stories that feed them.  While all these topics have been powerful in working with individuals’ personal myths, none has been more intriguing than the topic of ghosts that haunt us. James Hollis’ book, Hauntings, has guided me in this pursuit.

One of the most cited ghosts is imperfection, of not measuring up, of feelings that one is not adequate, of feeling small and insignificant in the world they inhabit.

I ask myself:  do these feelings of discontent, of feeling ashamed in their imperfection, originate only in one’s early upbringing? Is this where one becomes attached to a series of habitual self-stories that we tell ourselves in our bewilderment of what our value is?

Is it not also cultural? We can recall dozens of ads shoveled at us daily through many outlets. Their message repeats one major theme: 1. Problem: You are not good enough as you are. 2. Solution: Use our product, service, or program and you will relocate to a more perfect you.

In the political arena rival opponents will seek out the imperfect, the gap, the falling short, the deception that make the other unworthy of leading. Compare them with me, the more perfect candidate, and you will see that. Being infiltrated by ghosts of imperfection is part of the fabric of our personal and cultural lives.

Sociologist Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection explores our life hauntings, especially the stinging ghost of feeling unseen unheard or valued. Her desire and determination to reclaim her own worthiness, of feeling more than “good enough” led her to search out the dynamics of feeling inadequate and falling short.

She learned that “perfection is an unattainable goal,” but that does not deter many from seeking it out. The consequences most often feel like signing on board a treadmill of terminal imperfection with no “off” switch.

In The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham deploy the wisdom of 12-step recovery programs. One key insight is that “spirituality involves first seeing ourselves truly, as the paradoxical and imperfect beings we are. . .”.

They refer to us as “paradoxical” because it is “only within our very imperfection that we can find peace and serenity available to us.”

When workshop participants write of this all-pervasive ghost of imperfection, then share it with others, they often comment on how healing it was to “go public,” with their ghosts of not feeling good enough ever since they were judged harshly by a parent or other authority.

Often individuals realize that in simply naming it, then claiming it through sharing with others struggling like them, they are able to begin forgiving themselves for the self-taunting inflicted on themselves, sometimes for years or decades. All share one belief: the process is as spiritual as any other life dimension.

I have recognized over time that participants are not seeking a quick fix or cure; rather, they seek being cared for, and the most important person in their lives to express this care is themselves.

They are no longer tethered to live a discounted life, as when we say of someone: “Simply discount what X has said or written.” Total dismissal.

It is a powerful moment when an individual realizes they have an inner authority to revise their narratives into plots of self-acceptance, not self-perfection.

Self-forgiveness becomes a positive antibody to neutralize self-shaming. They can choose to retire the ghost that escorted them to this changed image of who they are.

Caring For Words is Caring For Culture

A version of this essay was published in the San Antonio Express-News, August 13, 2024. A-11.

Like breathing, we don’t generally think deeply about the words we use in normal communication.

Yet there is something basic about connecting the words people express and the health of the cultural world in which they live.

The origin of the word “word” is fascinating. In Old English, “wurda,” and even earlier, “were,” meant “to speak or say. “When we think of where we directly address words, we find numerous examples: “It’s his word against mine, “to break one’s word,” “in the beginning was the Word,” ‘to put words into someone’s mouth,” “may I have a word with you?” and “one is as good as their word.”

Words are a guide. I begin each day by journaling about the day before. It’s as if I cannot make sense of what happened unless I submit it to words. Only then do yesterday’s events rise to another level of reality.

Psychologist James Hillman has written: “Speech and myth are one and the same.” What we do to soil and stain speech directly affects the shared mythology owe live by.  To debase or trivialize speech is to diminish and tarnish the myth we share. Democracy as our shared myth is then abused; if the abuse is repeated endlessly, to the undiscerning audience it becomes reality. The result is a further erosion and corrosion of what holds us together in a common good.

For a current example: I listened recently to Donald Trump answer questions at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, his first. Most often, instead of answering questions from reporters directly with specifics, he used their inquiries to launch vitriolic invectives against his political opponents. His vocabulary was demeaning and enraged: “crooked Hilary” “stupid Joe,” the worst president in history, “Gavin Newscum,” Kamala Harris “is not bright, cannot hold a news conference, ruined San Francisco, ruined California, . . . “World War Three is imminent if I lose.”

I felt I was in the presence of a man both enraged and deranged, without boundaries, lashing out at whatever crossed his mind with no logical sequence or point accept to attack others with untruths, fantasies of world doom, an obsession with crowd sizes that put his crowds in the history books as the largest that have ever gathered.

I was unsettled as well by the narrow bandwidth of his vocabulary that in his self-praise, never reached beyond “incredible,” “unbelievable,” and “never before in history has this happened,” and other blusters that felt like a person in desperate need of feeling the approval of others. His oscillations between blame and self-praise were mind-numbing.

Of course we can grow numb to words, to slogans, to cliches emanating from personal fantasies. Therein lies its danger for individuals and for the cultural health of a nation.

Words themselves are prostituted to serve a frantic ideology shared by a few, not the many. Such an ideology divorces us from a shared communal sense of what is real and beneficial for the greatest number. In its place a dead myth attempts to pass for what is true.

The upshot of such a shift is that the distortions, lies and untruths can infect and reshape our world; they deform, divide, and deflect us from our shared humanity. Look closely at the words used in political discourse; there you will see a mirror of the world shaped or misshaped by such rhetoric.

Seeing this clearly is the first step toward tempering the tantrums of distortion by reclaiming the truth we share. Our well-being depends on it.

A National Threshold Crossing

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung on July 31, 2024.

We cannot always plan or orchestrate when a liminal space might arise. From the Latin word “limen,” it means threshold. It also connotes “transition.” It can refer to something personally, locally or nationally. But transformation seems to be its trajectory.

Liminality is a universal construction; it has been with us since the beginning of time. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, has called liminality “the space of imaginal activism.” It is a vibrant space where something new may arise.

Not only is liminality spatial; it can be a moment or an instant in time that is often seen more clearly when we look back at its occurrence. Then we grasp more readily its mythic overtones, even mythic renewal.

In liminality, something is crossed over—perhaps a new beginning of some impulse, some movement, some yearning that finds its time and space to emerge. It marks the space between what has been, like a habitual way of thinking, speaking and behaving, and into a new, fresh, reinvigorated and expansive arrangement that ushers in renewed energy. Its enthusiasm highlights what has been needed but not heretofore recognized. In liminal moments, the psychic energy moves from a former stasis into new kinetic power.

What had grown stale with overuse and abuse is sidestepped. Now accompanied by a feeling of renewal and reinvigoration, a sacred element may enter to secure a greater liberation for its members. Of course, not everyone will agree with what the threshold crossing expresses. It seldom is.

Rohr points out what the ancient Celtic people called “thin times,” was often celebrated with a ritual. The thinness of these moments collapsed to allow separate worlds to join hands: this current world we share, and the next world that is in embryo. Time also congealed in liminal moments; past, present and future dissolve into a communion where all time became unified.

The above might be recognized in expressions like: “It’s about time!” or “Why did it take so long to happen?” or “I thought this day would never come.” And yet here it is, nurtured by the energies of liminality.

Liminal thresholds can also emerge from a collective yearning, perhaps for a new narrative to replace one grown crusty, brittle and exhausted. Or a story that no longer serves the common good. As such, liminal moments spring more from imagining than reasoning. A yearning that brings us closer to the theme of this essay is the yearning in a nation to refashion itself through more humane and equitable values, even more tolerant attitudes towards one another. Integrity, generosity, compassion, coherence are the energy pockets of a liminal experience.

Something or someone appears in liminal space; it is creative space, where all may benefit from its largesse.

Liminal space is both an “opening” and “open” to wisdom, to value revision, to hunger for depth both in understanding and in quality of life. Its space hosts new ideas. A reinvigorated future we could not have imagined before suddenly becomes possible.

When Joe Biden yielded his position as presidential candidate for another term, he created a liminal space overnight.

Into that liminality a woman of color stepped into this opening as a candidate for the presidency. The outpouring of support in both morale and money has been unprecedented. That is what liminal moments often convey—the unprecedented.

What is also part of this liminal moment is the likelihood of a new plot to build up and out. An old established boundary has yielded to new plot options in the service of a more equitable freedom for diverse voices to enjoy.

Family Photo Albums a Portal to the Past

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, July 20-21, 2024

My wife Sandy recently decided to tackle two full shelves of boxes containing photos collected over 4 decades. Her goal: to sort them into thematic stacks, then choose from among the roughly 900 photos and gather 200 of them into photo albums with plastic sleeves. We had never taken home movies, so only the photos hold images of our histories.

She commandeered both the kitchen and living room tables for 8 days and worked diligently for hours each day—a lady with a fervent mission: to excavate our pasts, including uncovering photos of herself as a young girl of 5, holding hands with her mother. I had never seen them, as well as many others from her history that antedated our meeting at Kent State University in 1966.

As I passed her working on this huge project, I would pause from my own business, pulled, it seemed, into the vortex of labeled piles of photos. I lingered and began surveying them. A sense of wonder came over me at the array of scattered photos covering both tables and decades of our lives.

 I fingered the photos now congregating in stacks with labels like “Motorcycles” (I had owned 8 over 55 years of riding); “Italy” (we lived in Rome for 2 years when I taught for a Texas university); “California” (10 years living and teaching in Santa Barbara); “vacation trips” in many states. “Conferences” in Italy, Ireland and 4 trips to Greece; “Our sons” (now 53 and 45); “grandchildren,” to name several.

And you know what happens: each photo has one or more stories sticking to it. Some are more vivid and involved than others. My wife patiently paused often in her mission as we asked questions like where the photo was taken, what year; or “remember that seafood restaurant in Maine we enjoyed so much? What was the couple’s names we met there for a meal?”

And suddenly the present moment was swallowed by the looming remembered past. We laughed about incidents that surrounded some photos like haloes, even auras, of adventure: a moment of risking a life change, a major move, a new city, state or country.

So many of the photos became transport carriers that ushered us out of the present time-space continuum into a past moment lived deeply through the image. We felt an acceleration of both imagining and remembering. It was a rush not to be rushed.

A feeling of nostalgia as well as gratitude arose and embraced us, as well as a trembling sadness for a life now vanished. But not quite, for the photos breathed new life into the moment; yes, a sense of loss, but also a sense of found. Something disremembered of our earlier selves was found in those enchanted moments of recollection.

So often she or I would say: “I’d completely forgotten we visited that place,” or “What was the name of that lake where we rented a motorboat and cruised on for a day?” And on--into new depths of recollection.

Yes, she recently finished her arduous and loving task.

 I have, however, not yet gone to the 2 albums holding her selections in the amber of plastic jackets. Perhaps this next weekend we’ll take another transit through time and linger once more over more stories that will certainly emerge from the deep past. And we will revisit once again many more moments that have so profoundly defined our identities.

Finding Value in the Pauses of Everyday Life

Originally appeared in the Herald-Zeitung, July 6-7, 2024.

We remember the popular soft drink commercials that ran for decades with the slogan: “The pause that refreshes.” Simple, easy to recall, it worked on us when we shopped. Another nod to pausing was the advice: “Count to five.” Another: “Take a deep breath.” All of these were in the service of the pause. Pausing is the other side of being so busy that we feel frenzied, overworked and overwhelmed and may suspect that a pause might refresh, but often we press on.

The pause creates a break, opens a gap, some silent space, for something or someone to enter, to be seen, to be heard, to be considered. Pausing has its own genius. It is a moment of self-consideration, even of self-care. It invites in a greater consciousness of who one is and what one thinks and does. Pausing, then, is not doing nothing.

Pausing is active, but in a more contemplative way. I say contemplative here because it relinquishes ego-control over what’s next. Pausing relinquishes ego control both of what will be and what has been.

In a very successful television series entitled The West Wing, from the genius of Aaron Sorkin that ran for 6 seasons, the president would insist from his advisors: “What’s Next?” No pause. Keep the affairs of state, the levers of power, in constant motion. Sometimes an illness, a ruptured relationship, the loss of a loved one, economic or psychological traumas, may force one to pause.

Best that the pause is an option that one can turn to when depletion is next on the agenda. It may be a conscious choice, it may be instinctive, it may be a life preserver tossed our way when we are swept downstream by objects, obsessions, others, or the squeezing necessity of finding instant solutions to complex conditions.

Vacations are ostensibly a more formalized form of pausing. Good luck. We know the response of some who are glad to be back at work after the pressing activities of a vacation that leave one seeking the workplace or simply being at home to recover.

I sense that running from pauses may be as exhausting as running from obligations. A pause is a choice of allowing oneself to be at home. In that at-home place in imagination, the pause may allow one to ask: “Why am I doing this or that?” What is its purpose? What is the value in continuing this path?” All important pause questions.

Here is my pause place. I like to rise early at 4 a.m. and have for the past 32 years. After fetching a coffee and lighting a candle in my study, I turn on my small gooseneck lamp and sit in my lounge chair. I pick up pen and journal—and then I pause. I am in between the new day just beginning, and yesterday fading now from memory. I enjoy this metaxis, a Greek word for an in-between space, the space of the pause.

I ask one question: what was joyful and challenging about yesterday when I was gifted and perhaps gifted another? I then write for about 30 minutes. It is both a pause that refreshes and a pause that remembers. Pausing, I have learned, allows that still point—where our deepest identity dwells—to be reached and renewed.

So one might ask: “how long should I pause for?” But that is an ego-control question. One might ask instead: “What has pausing allowed to open up in me, something to reconsider, or someone who needs caring for?”

Finally, we may respond to an impulse to pause with: “Catch me later; I’m busy.”It never arrives.

Ageism And Elderhood

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News June 20, 2024

Questions about President Joe Biden’s age have intensified recently as ways to discredit him and his ability to lead. But their questions are often wrongheaded. Instead of putting aging in one category, biology, we should be asking different questions about competence and character, not the calendar as indicator of being able to lead successfully. But this one category fuels ageism and stereotypes of growing older.

Stereotypes of aging narrow our imaginations of what growing older implicates. Implicit in ageism stereotypes: Someone younger is better. We need a more youthful leader. Fantasies of superior qualities in younger candidates compared to the worn down-and-out elder proliferate.  Ageism then accelerates wrong impressions of incompetence and the ability to create constructive public policies.

Yet living into later years has benefits often discounted in the rush to demote Biden. What is kept out of the discussion include the following:  a deeper, more holistic life perspective, a softening of perceptions through compassion, moving away from the hardening of the arteries of outmoded ways of thinking and responding, a deeper commitment to service through awareness of the needs of others, accumulation of experience that grows from a source of wisdom, a more fully-formed character honed from years of dealing with prickly political issues, the ability to tolerate multiple perspectives, and seeing the deep truth of one’s life.

Psychologist James Hillman asks in his book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life: what is character? This is different from being a character; rather, character points to who one is meant to be. It respects one’s destiny, the core of one’s integrity, often clarified through the harder lessons of life, like loss, suffering, the ability to feel into another’s plights and aspirations, becoming more compassionate towards one’s limits, and sensing the inherent value of something larger than oneself.

These qualities inhabit the elder, not one simply aging. Aging privileges chronology and biology; eldering highlights a transition into a wider orbit of understanding and a deeper consciousness of what will benefit the common good.

In eldering one grows more aware of their specific mythology: an awareness of what has organized and ordered one’s life, produced a greater coherence, and identified what meanings predominate as one grows down into life. One’s unique character grows compliantly towards these senses of what is important and establishes what to relinquish in life’s later stages.  

One can be in one’s 70s or older, yet remain arrested at an adolescent stage, which demands its own way as the only option.  But Hillman suggests “we need to recognize how helplessly our thinking about the last of life has been trapped in disparaging ageism” that fixes older people as handicapped by body breakdown and enfeebling restrictions.  Again, a failure to imagine more deeply.

He also believes that “ideas of soul, of individual character and the influence of awareness of life processes have become necessary decorations” to hide a basic premise: “Old age is affliction.” We must examine our fantasies of aging and set it beside what President Biden has accomplished within an unrelenting schedule that demands a level of stamina, experience and expertise that individuals much younger would find exhausting.

Biden’s consistent “force of character,” his diplomatic skills honed from a lifetime in the public arena of world politics and his presence as a beacon for the common good, has not been without flaws. Yet they too have shaped his character.

Within his own limits, he has heard and responded to the call of eldering rather than to fixed, narrow obsessions for self-gain. In the latter pursuit, character degenerates into caricature, a distorted version of the good.

Late in life, through the quality of character, as Hillman notes, “there is a clear distinction between statistical prolongation and psychological extension.” The soul of aging honors the latter.         

Lessons of Myth and the Creation of Reality: Procrustes

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung in New Braunfels, Texas, June 13, 2024. A-4 and A-10.

As a lifelong student of mythology from many cultures, I am always asking how ancient myths shed light on our contemporary world both locally and globally. Because myths tell us ageless stories of who we are, what we seek, the values we adhere to, and what connection to the divine seem to be constants in their stories, I found the ancient story of the Greek hero Theseus and his ordeals with human situations worth exploring.

Myths often appear as puzzles that we puzzle over to see what gold might be contained in them. Theseus’ story initially centers on whether he is in fact the son of King Aegeus, who instructs the young man’s mother, Aethra, to take Theseus to a particular rock to test whether he has the strength to lift the rock and find beneath it his father’s sword and sandals. Then he is to journey to Athens to give them to his father and declare himself the legitimate son.

But instead of taking the safer passage across water, Theseus chooses to travel along the coast which is peopled by all sorts of criminals. In his journey to Athens, he is confronted with one after another of ordeals who test his skills as a man and warrior.

One of the last ones he encounters is Procrustes, perhaps the best known, according to mythologist Edward Edinger (The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology). Procrustes delighted in capturing travelers and laying them out on his famous bed, the bed of Procrustes. All had to fit his bed perfectly. If they were too long, he cut them down to size to fit the bed’s length; if too short, he stretched them out until they filled the bed.

Edinger helps us to think about what is taking place psychologically and culturally in this mythic tale: “A procrustean bed is a rigid, preconceived attitude that pays no attention to the living reality one is confronting, but brutally forces it to conform to one’s preconceptions.” Remember that myths are not to be taken literally but metaphorically. So, we must imagine into the action of the story to glean its insights but avoid getting caught on the procrustean bed of literalism.

What the myth reveals, as Edinger describes it, is using alien standards by which to judge something or someone while sacrificing our own standards for what is real, what false. Amputating or stretching some situation or condition beyond their normal shape ends with a distortion of reality, while ignoring its natural condition.

We might see in this simple but profound story what harm is done by deforming, bending and fantasizing the truth of a shared reality so that what we generally agree on as to what is real is open to all forms of grotesque convulsions. Making up reality to enhance or encourage a fiction that serves an ideology harms the body politic and the health of a people or a nation.

Distortions pretend that they are the real truth, while harboring a more sinister design, often led by appetites for power, control and finally, domination. At the same time, all contrary points of view are vilified and dismantled to keep the distortion supreme. Pretense is at the heart of Procrustean malformations.

Finally, when a myth is active, organic and assists us all to further align our purposes with principles that serve the common good, Procrustes is silenced and his actions muted. But Procrustean influences are never far from the surface.

Solar and Lunar Powers of Myth

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, April 11, 2024

The cloud cover where we live in New Braunfels kept the eclipse mostly out of sight, except for a few rare peeks through the fast-moving clouds. Nonetheless, we had the experience that proved the power and force of the celestial order.

I brought out a sleeping bag and placed it on our driveway. Then my wife Sandy and our sweet cat, Ginger, laid on our backs for the better part of an hour and glimpsed through the ether at a white sun slowly overtaken by the black moon. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped, night descended on our neighborhood, all birds stopped their songs, and we were plunged into a cosmic darkness that left us breathless. The cat seemed to take it all in purring stride.

Such is the power of myth. When the sky soon lightened, we gathered up the sleeping bag and went in to watch the moon’s cosmic shadow race northeast at 1500 miles per hour, towards Dallas. It slid up through several states and into Canada. The reports from every news team stationed along its shadowy path was the same: “WOW!”

And something else, something that emanated directly from the feminine moon’s presence eclipsing the masculine sun’s brilliance for a few moments that created a sublime unity within the darkness. The two celestial bodies elicited from many who experienced it a felt sense of unity, of coherence, of a shared species story that we exist on this planet as home. A feeling of homecoming descended on viewers from whatever angle of vision they chose.

Couples along the way proposed marriage and its rousing acceptance; others married, singly or in groups—another joyful outburst of masculine and feminine energies finding one another both before and during the darkness.

The energies unleashed in the eclipse bent towards feelings of wholeness, of a shared narrative felt viscerally; it was not hard to believe that so many felt, even if they did not see, the energy pervading the atmosphere. For a few moments a shared narrative illuminated and conjoined all participants, a new way of seeing through dark glasses, if necessary. The result was a rising tide of coherence, cohesion, and clarity.

Feelings of relationships with others who moments before might have been viewed as strangers were the result of something stirring deep within the inner cosmos of each of us. The eclipse revitalized a narrative of connectivity we had have forgotten amidst the current negativity of divisiveness and squabbling over ideologies and petty elbowing for power.

For a short time, ideologies themselves were blessedly eclipsed by the mythologies of moon conversing with the sun over thousands of miles separating them. As we watched the various locales where the viewing was sublimely clear, we felt moments of what I would describe as reclamation, a return of feminine power and presence through the lunar wisdom of insight. It moderated the more Apollonian brilliance of solar energy. For a moment they too were in communion.

In this historic moment we were all connected by the umbilical cord of time back into history and into prehistory, a time that antedated our own presence in the universe. Such connection offered a resurgence of our shared life story, from beyond antiquity to the present. And well into the future.

Finally, as my wife and I continue to reflect on April 8th. We knew that this event had such a firm mythic foundation, in the sense that myths often point us to ontology, to the nature of being itself. We are called “human beings.” Perhaps during the eclipse, we might have been called “human becomings-in-community.” From now on we will tell our stories of where we were and what we saw, as part of a renewed species story, and how we consolidated with one another in a firm illumination of wholeness.

What a respite it was to be with one another, free of toxic acerbities that divide us, and to celebrate instead our home in what gives us joy.

Has Silence Been Vanquished Today?

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung’s Opinion page, May 3, 2024.

I remember attending catholic elementary and high school many decades ago. I performed well in all my classes but one: when our teachers asked us to be silent. My classmates and I struggled with this discipline, this attitude, of being still and silent for part of the class day. I failed miserably.

Today it is often difficult to find places of refuge, pockets of silence; as a nation of extraverts, we seem to demand noise, music, activity, play, and keeping busy inside a noisy bubble. Silence seems to frighten many people. It appears to be so unproductive, and producing is one of the hallmarks of a consumer culture.

Some schools are introducing basic meditation practices that encourage and cultivate silence as a behavior that can calm, order, and organize one’s thoughts, aspirations, anxieties and general well-being. It tends to the soul life of the student, not just to their minds and bodies.

Thomas Moore, a fine writer and author of one of the best-selling books in decades, Care of the Soul, has gathered his thoughts and practices in a recent book with an enticing title: The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness. The word emptiness may put off many would-be readers of his reflections. But his history reveals how deeply he descended into silence.

From the ages of 13 to 26 Thomas lived in a monastery where the religious life emphasized obedience to a routine with a minimum of clutter and of desires to purchase and possess. A pleasurable life, he learned, was not a possession-filled life; in fact, the latter may cancel out the former. His life of openness gave space for the soul’s needs.

In silence there is time to reconsider, to ponder what and who one is, where one is headed and the purpose for one’s life. In silence one may grasp the important difference between what one wants and what one needs. This kind of discernment can grow out of emptiness, which is not a vacuum but an attitude of contentment, not grasping, not clinging, not wanting but being.

We all know the capitalist adage: time is money. But what if we placed that conventional wisdom next to “time is meaning.” The second truth encourages open spaces, gaps, cracks in the solid block of each day for slowing down.

I also liked the short entertaining chapters. Each begins with a quote from a wisdom text, a poem, a play, a film, a fairy tale that sets the table for that chapter’s meditation. Each ends with a blank page, an empty space, where the reader might jot down how the chapter impacted some insight from their own life. We are given some emptiness to complete the text through the filters of our own experiences.

Eloquence is also playful: a few chapter titles include “The Empty Pot,” “The Empty Plate,” “The Wine Ran Out,” “Sacred Ignorance.” They bespeak a sense of humor driving Thomas’ reflections that encourage a quiet presence to the ordinary motions of one’s day and night.

When we hear, for example, that someone is “full of himself,” we know that emptiness is not a major goal. The observation is not a compliment. Too much self, not enough trust and willingness to accept what is.

Thomas likes the image of a life structure with many doors and windows that let the air of life in. He encourages us not to stuff all the openings in our daily life, which leaves no room for surprise, for the unexpected, even for wonder to enter.

Quiet, he believes, is a form of emptiness, which is so important for any of us who wish to “reflect and remember.”  Open the windows, prop life’s doors, and breathe easily. Abundance will appear everywhere.

Odysseus: A Myth Retrieved and Updated

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, March 1, 2024.

This morning, early, I walked out for the newspaper, this one, and looked up at the full moon. It looked different; it was surrounded by a light haze of clouds accompanying its voyage. I felt the same chill as I did over half a century ago when the first astronauts touched down on its surface and left a footprint.

My wife and I watched with millions of others on February 22nd, when, after several challenges, teamwork, and ingenuity, as well as resolute resiliency in responding to glitches in the systems, the robotic craft landed.

NASA has used Greek names before, beginning in the 1950s; originally they named missions after sky deities: Apollo and Saturn, then beginning in 2022, Artemis replaced Apollo and there are four more Artemis voyages on the books. There was also the Mercury (Greek, Hermes) program. But this mission was named after a Greek hero, whose story is immortalized most fully in the Greek poet Homer’s magnificent epic, the Odyssey. In 24 Books, Homer tells the story of one Greek warrior who leaves his home of Ithaka to fight in the Trojan war. It lasts 10 years. His return, initially with many men and ships, is filled with challenges and obstacles often created by the gods, that strip from him all his ships, men, and possessions. But Odysseus is wily, a trickster and able to adapt in an instant to unforeseen challenges.

He arrives at his homeland with nothing but the stories he carries in his memory, for he has substantially changed. His voyage home was one one of self-discovery as well as self-recovery from his traumatic war wounds inflicted on him for many years. As he leaves Troy, he is more like an orphan without a home or a full sense of self; but with the aid of the goddess Athene as well as other feminine figures, both human and divine, he finds his way home. As did the robotic Odysseus.

Every journey away from home carries the seeds of a homecoming; these are archetypal or universal events that happen to all of us; since they are universal experiences, they are the core of mythic stories. They help to organize events and situations into coherent forms that we can reflect upon. Myths give events their identity, which opens a way to understand their meaning.

NASA partnering with Intuitive Machines, have their home in Houston’s “Space City.” Their Odysseus is a robotic lander, partly relying on being controlled from home, partly autonomous. Its onboard software was autonomous from 6 miles up as it scouted for a safe home on which to land. Like Odysseus, it knew when to follow instructions from the gods in Houston and when to exercise its autonomy. My sense is that a new myth is being formed before our eyes, as an ancient hero partners with tomorrow’s technology.

In addition, individuals in the space community have begun to ask new questions: “race to the moon, being first” is being outmoded as a story that is too narrow. Other questions are arising: How does this event expand human progress?

How might we partner with other countries in joint ventures? Who owns the moon and sets down perimeters for those whose space programs include landing on it? What ethical concerns should we entertain in this process of leaving home for another habitation? I would add: what myth should we watch for and help create because of this monumental event in history?

Homer’s Odysseus returns to Ithaca, but he will journey out again, to a foreign land where no none recognizes an oar; there he will die, in his final home.

Mission Director, Tim Crain, uttered the new myth when he announced: “Odysseus has a new home.” In that sense, we all are Odysseus experiencing a home we will get to know intimately in the coming years. Homecoming is a mythic enterprise.

History and Its Consequences

Originally Published in the Opinion Page of the Herald-Zeitung February 10-11, 2024.

I am hearing from more friends and acquaintances their feelings of exhaustion, of depression, anxiety and even loss of life energy in their daily lives. A recent national study revealed that feelings of alienation, of being on the margins of life rather than centered within it, are causing panic attacks and disruptions in eating habits.

Friends admit that the endless rounds of news stories of violence, coercions, examples of injustice, of exclusions of large swaths of citizens on racial, ethnic or economic grounds are gaining momentum. What, I have to wonder, is assaulting the American psyche to create such conditions of scarcity, discomfort and feelings of dis-ease?

The possibilities are endless, but Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offers some worthy insights that might help us think more clearly about the current accelerating malaise. But we need a frame of history to see it.

He offers in one of his daily meditations, gathered in a volume entitled Yes, and…daily meditations, that early in our history as a species, we “were deeply connected to myth, story, and the pre-rational.” A deep connection to the natural world and close observations of its patterns of birth, growth and death, grounded us as a people in these rhythms that sustained us and allowed a shared sense of what is real to prevail. The earth’s nature and our human nature were bound in the same web of life.

With the rise of the scientific and industrial revolutions, he continues, arose “the birth of individualism—and individual consciousness.” Here is where he identifies one of the major splits that have shaped our at times skewed world today: This rise of self-consciousness was accompanied, fortunately by “responsibility, ethics, and personal subjective experience.” But it carried with it a shadow, as is true of most moments of psychic reality.

The shadow had a shape: “privatized self-absorption, ego defensiveness and mental overanalyzing. What was deleted with this new formulation that in today’s world has become so excessive in its distortions, is a deeply human involvement that takes in earth, spirit, body and stories that carry the prevailing myth of wholeness and coherence. When a myth that was once collectively believed in begins to tarnish, corrode and find itself under attack by competing myths, it can no longer sustain itself or the people who subscribed to it. Excessive attention to the individual over the collective breeds a malaise of dis-ease, of non-inclusion and deepening alienation.

Beliefs, faiths, and certainties begin to break down in such an atmosphere, one appears to thrive on gaining power, control and authority, perhaps snatched from the social body rather than earned.  The result is a crippling of the social and cultural body because of assaults to its integrity and truth. Truth itself is given wide berth; in its place are fantasies, ideologies and falsehoods that further undermine a populace that has lost its ability to reflect deeply on its surroundings.

Rohr ends his reflection by offering a way forward, inward and outward: a healthy society “must combine the best of both worlds: the mythic and nonrational” that opens one to the wholeness beneath the fragmented world, along with “the critical and rational to keep us honest and humble about what we can know and what we don’t know.”

Here begins the long and arduous path to retrieve a sense of coherence, faith and honesty that no one is excluded from participating in. No one should feel unattached from participating in such an enterprise to restore wholeness to the commonwealth.

Loss of a Caregiver

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, January 20, 2024.

The email was as startling as it was unexpected. My wife and I had received it on our computers simultaneously:  the family physician we had enjoyed for more than a decade had left the consortium of which she was a member. Nothing more could be learned nor offered. We were asked to call in to be assigned another caregiver and so remain in the consortium’s membership. Simple as that. Swap out one doctor for one we had never met nor knew anything about. Without exaggerating here, we were both traumatized by this abrupt shift in our medical lives.

When we had this physician highly recommended to us years ago, I waited for 5 months for a vacancy to open before I was accepted into her practice. My wife waited another 3 months before she was invited to be a patient. We counted our lucky stars for several reasons.  

We had never had a family doctor who listened as closely as she did, who gave us all the time in the world, as if we were her only patients. In reality, her schedule was always booked solid. But when the door closed and it was just the doctor and me,  I felt that, yes, this person saw me as a full and complex individual, not as another unit carrying the label: patient.

Another important advantage we were to learn over the years: she was thoroughly connected to a network of other doctors in New Braunfels. My eye doctor, a superior fellow in his field, was her recommendation. My Ear, Nose and Throat doctor was also recommended by her, and by extension, the young doctor who introduced me into the world of hearing aids. 

Our former doctor networked for her patients and made sage recommendations because she knew us so well. Knowing our medical histories, she was able on more than one occasion to suggest cease taking certain medications I no longer needed, based on physical exams and my history.

She also offered short tests for memory loss, tests for depression, anxiety, level of life satisfaction, for meaning in life. She treated the whole person, not the individual who happened to have a body.

But her best medication, which she doled out generously, either in person or on a zoom call, was her gift of listening, holding back professional advice until she was sure she had grasped a more nuanced sense of which physical, psychic and emotional health I conveyed in our conversations.

Over time, and a bit beleaguered as a sole physician in her practice, she joined a consortium of doctors in order to have a larger network of colleagues with whom to consult on various patients. All to the good.

Then suddenly, she was gone. Without a trace. It felt at that moment for my wife and me that a close friend of many years had died; she was someone in whom we confided intimate details of our lives that besides us, no one else was privy to. As it should be. Confidentiality is another of those medical absolutes based on trust that is nurtured between caregiver and patient.

As we age into our late 70s, the relationship we had with our beloved doctor-- and many of you reading this know the experience—was suddenly over; we felt this dramatic loss with great sadness. I think the uncertainty of what happened to her is most haunting. The psychic and emotional cost we continue to feel as it grows more acute, rather than diminishes, is a major adjustment in our lives.

All of us know the priceless treasure of a caring caregiver. It goes way beyond skin deep.  

A New Year and a New Myth

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 1, 2024

Years before his death in 1987, the renowned mythologist, Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) offered reflections in an interview about where he saw we were as a culture and as a nation. This and other interviews are contained in a host of interviews just published in November: Joseph Campbell: Myth and Meaning. Conversations on Mythology and Life.

In our current plight of accelerating information and increasing tribal loyalty groups bent on their own political and economic agenda, Campbell saw that this structure was out of date and detrimental to the real crisis of today: the health of the planet.

He dreamed that out of this static state of rigid dogmatism there might be an evolving mythic image of a global man [sic]. Today we would say a global person. It would, however, require a collective effort to transcend national identities for it to occur. Such a migration of thought would allow us to ease the tensions today between a “pull toward a more universal perspective and a contraction into tribal, sectarian groups.”

But Campbell was a life-long, card-carrying optimist. He believed that we could as a species create a mythology for people “recognizing the humanity of a person on the other side of the tennis net.” Such a mythology would allow a collective pilgrimage, not of nations, but of a species into a realm of no more horizons but the planet itself. The horizons placed on any group or collection of people and nations, are placed on it by the myths they choose to ritualize their values through. Campbell believed that when such limitations are removed, a global perspective would be possible.

He is clear-eyed, however, in what he proposed decades ago: “Nothing will really straighten out until the sociological image of the planet, rather than of this group or that group, takes over.” He made this remark well before the climate catastrophe was yet to enter our consciousness in the language, much less the insistent factions that deny there is even a  problem.

His thinking, as one who studied world mythologies for his entire adult life, is that “in terms of history, we are coming to an end of a national and tribal consciousness.” Even the interest groups that cling to their own agendas have the capacity to shift their perspective to see that “the shared interest group before us is “our society is the human race. And our little suburb is the globe. Spaceship Earth.”

Campbell had a novel take on the root image of all viable, organic myths, namely, the way they promote accord with the world of nature; he even includes history as part of nature, including our human nature;  damaging, exhausting, and exploiting the Earth is to exploit our own natures in this destructive cycle.

While we all recognize the global reach of the myth of capitalism which unites the world order, it does nothing to elevate the spirit of humankind, which is essential for our survival. Campbell saw this in world mythologies; for him the “new myth is going to be one that recognizes the whole planet as our society.” People experience this sense of unity when visiting other countries and befriending and engaging others in human conversations. Within a global consciousness, the foreign becomes family.  

Finally, as Campbell asserts: “in one’s political action and influences, if one can think of oneself as a member of a world community without betraying the legitimate interests of one’s local neighborhood, one would be helping the world forward.”

The result of all these efforts performed by each of us, would be a breakthrough, “which has to be of the recognition of the planet as the Holy Land.” Such a miraculous revisioning of ourselves could lift us out of self-serving interests into a world community where the planet herself is respected as our true home.

In the wide sweep of human history, dreams of the future have often come through.       

Re-visioning the American Psyche

I am pleased to announce this edited series of essays on the American psyche from a multitude of perspectives. Published in November of this year, it offers new, original and in-depth explorations of our collective psyche in a period of radical, rapid and at times explosive bursts of the irrational, complex and continually fascinating myth that we live within and outside of simultaneously. My own essay, that I was delighted to be invited to write and submit, is entitled “Captain Abah and Donald Trump: False Claims, the Fragility of Belief, and the Perilous Ship of America’s Soul.”

I hope that you will consider adding it to your library. Its multidisciplinary, depth and archetypal inflections offer new understandings of where we are as a nation and where the ship of state, even as it takes on water, is moving steadily towards uncharted seas.

The remainder of this short announcement appears on the back cover of the volume. It offers perceptive and multi-layered perspectives on this collection, so admirably collected, edited and guided in every step leading to its publication, by Dr. Ipek Burnett, one of the most generous and critically-equipped souls to guide the direction and quality of this rich and, we hope, enduring congregation of ideas and images helps us to refashion the American myth in its potential for inclusiveness.

Overview

The United States is at a crossroads: Moving away from the stalemate of political polarization and culture wars requires reflection, critical thinking, and imagination. This book of collected essays brings together leaders in Jungian and archetypal psychology to forge this path by offering a comprehensive look at the American psyche.

Re-Visioning the American Psyche examines the myths, images, and archetypal fantasies ingrained in the collective consciousness and unconscious in the United States. The volume tends to manifest symptoms in political institutions, social conflicts, and cultural movements. Using various interpretative processes―from psychoanalytic to literary and to participatory―it reflects on the meaning of democratic participation, the psychological cost of wars and violence, intergenerational trauma due to racism, the emotional dimensions of political polarization, deep-seated oppositional thinking in patriarchal structures, frailty of the American Dream, and more.

With its rich scope, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical engagement with historical and current affairs, this book will be of great interest to those in Jungian and depth psychology, as well as sociology, politics, cultural studies, and American studies. As a timely contribution with an international appeal, it will engage readers who are invested in better understanding psychology’s capacity to respond to social, cultural, and political realities.

Reviews

"Building on her brilliant cultural analysis in A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche, Burnett now brings together fifteen authors to reflect on a wide range of American topics from political polarization to intergenerational trauma to capitalism and patriarchy. With rigorous research, imagination, kaleidoscope insights and heartfelt expression, this collection confirms depth psychology's potential to contribute to social responsibility. Interdisciplinary in nature, timely and timeless at once, this is a great contribution to Jungian studies and beyond."

Andrew Samuels, author of The Political Psyche

"America is on the couch as never before in this splendid collection of essays edited by Ipek S. Burnett. The remarkable success of the collection is to achieve coherence with diversity, wide coverage of topics with depth of analysis, and combine different depth psychological lenses with ancient myth and twenty-first century suspicion of patriarchal and religious apologias. However, perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Re-Visioning the American Psyche is to make the good old USA into a case study of contemporary philosophical and political crises. Can democracy exist in systematically repressed psyches? Can the psyche exist if history is systemically falsified and social justice denied? Truly, this book demonstrates that Jungian psychology is a valuable critical lens across multiple social and humanities disciplines. Re-visioning the American Psyche is essential reading for anyone in America or who wants to understand Americans."

Susan Rowland, core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, author of C.G. Jung in the Humanities.

"Revisioning The American Psyche cannot be engaged with the mind alone but through the pores of our skin. Ipek S. Burnett has collected and arranged a number of essays that are designed to liberate us from traditional narratives about America that have permeated our psyche. The still quiet voice of care is awakened as we ask ourselves not only what it means to be a citizen of a differentiated humanity but how can caring manifest into collective action"

Robin McCoy Brooks, co-Editor-in-Chief of Intergenerational Journal of Jungian Studies and author of Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action.

'Tis the Season For-giving

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, December 9, 2023.

We are now in that rich and generous season of showing our love, admiration, and care for others through gifts, some of which are temporary gestures and others are gifts that “keep on giving.” As tangible forms, these objects that reveal thoughtfulness, care and love of others, represent love’s expression.

Recently, however, I realized another gifting through the engaging and transformative book on The Wisdom of Forgiveness by Victor Chan. He was a close friend of the Tibetan sage, the Dalai Lama years ago, and wrote of his experiences accompanying His Holiness through countries all over the world. The theme the Dalai Lama returned to for most of his life was Forgiveness; he saw it as a gift that one can bestow or gift to oneself and to others.

Ever since he was driven out of his beloved Tibet when the Chinese invaded his country in 1959, the Dalai Lama has lived in exile. Such forced homelessness, as his people were tortured and killed by Chinese invaders, would embitter any of us; to be homeless for decades was even more painful  for one so in love with his people. Yet, through his Buddhist practices of compassion for others, his exile served him in ministering to people to its wonders across the globe.

His life on the road gave him a unique perspective on suffering and even in finding “joy in the sorrows of the world.” He taught that to dehumanize others in any form “was to dehumanize myself.” By contrast, “to forgive was actually the best form of self-interest.”  

The road of compassion and the road of forgiveness are tightly interrelated, as is one of the essential beliefs of Buddhist thought held by the Dalai Lama:  we are all interconnected in an intricate web of relationships. Nothing exists independently, by itself. Instead,  the spiritual leader learned that everything is dependent on everyone and everything.  To forgive is to be forgiven. To hate, to resent, to chastise, to brutalize others, is to perform the same intentions on oneself.

Forgiveness, however, opens one out of the cocoon of one’s own concerns, sufferings, torments, and frustrated desires that are most often self-inflicted. To forgive, on the other hand, is to widen one’s orbit of concern and understanding. It is also an opportunity to forge a larger relation, through stretching one’s understanding to care for others, things, and the Earth herself.

His biographer Victor Chan cites the Dalai Lama: “To reduce hatred and other destructive emotions, you must develop their opposites: compassion and kindness. They will help you in your spiritual development.”

I have recently made my own list of those who I would like to forgive this holiday season. I wrestle with beginning with myself, for the harm that I have caused others.  I can recall treating others at times with disrespect, with ignoring them, or in knowing someone could use a phone call to comfort them and refraining from doing so. If I am to truly enter this season of giving, I must begin with for-giving.

Think of forgiving someone in the form of a phone call or a letter or a special note on a Christmas card telling them you care for and love them. In that small but critically meaningful act, you participate, in the words of the Dalai Lama, “in the future, which extends to global well-being.” His thinking is echoed, in attitude and practice, in the words of our own “Our Father” petition: “. . . and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us. . . .”

Begin with your own self-trespasses; in that single act you enter forgiving all the wounds against you, for we are all, finally, co-dependent on one another; it is where our deepest humanity is shared with others, extending out to the world at large.

Happy Forgiveness!

The Many Faces of Prejudices and Their Influence

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, November 24, 2023.

No one can successfully avoid them. They creep into our lives with great stealth and energy. It is human nature that this process is universal. But we can become conscious of them, so they show themselves in their shaping and framing power to create who we are.

I am referring to the power of prejudices and their offspring: assumptions, opinions, hunches, a felt sense of things, inheritances from others, negative thoughts and feelings. The meaning of prejudice—to cause “injury, physical harm”—arises in the mid 14th.century, as does the legal sense of “detriment or damage caused by the violation of a legal right.”

The meaning, “preconceived opinion” (especially but not necessarily unfavorable) is from late 14th. century in English; now usually understood as a “decision formed without due examination of the facts or arguments necessary to a just and impartial decision” (www.etymology.com). “To terminate with extreme prejudice,” meaning to “kill,” is by 1972, its most frequent description.

Many meanings cluster around the above history of the word. I am focusing though on “preconceived opinion.” It connotes a view that one forms with often only a tenuous connection  to reality. Prejudices can certainly protect us from facing what might be distasteful or injurious to our sense of identity, to our unique world view, and to internal clusters of beliefs that harden into fixed positions with no latitude for flexibility.

We sense that prejudices are extremely effective in creating and sustaining tribal thought and behavior because prejudices often label without knowing, or knowing fully, or knowing the truth over against a deception. Then we often tend to fill in what we don’t know with assumptions, stereotypes, diagrams of grouping and collecting others into a mass audience with few differences or distinctions. In short, absent particulars.

Prejudices, I sense, also flourish in the darkness of a fearful life or are created to generate fear and loathing of that ever-present specter: “the Other.” In prejudice, the soul aligns itself with an image that is in a questionable equilibrium with a shared commons sense of things as they are. It may then create or manufacture its own reality to coincide with its own idea of reality.

Cultural observer and critic Brooke Gladstone reminds us in her provocative book, The Trouble with Reality, “Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.”  I take this as a given, and yet we know that reality can extend out from the personal.

Dispelling prejudices rests on a new level of awareness and a generous accommodation of otherness.  We may say “I am willing to accommodate this reality without agreeing with it or attacking it.” Which makes me wonder: Can a prejudice we hold allow us to see more, not less. I say this because prejudice does not have to be an exclusively negative judgement. One can be positively prejudiced towards learning, towards helping others, toward practicing resiliency.

Finally, our prejudices are mythic, that is to say, they assist us in shaping, forming and creating what gives our lives coherence, order and arrangement. They help us align our interior lives with the outer world we inhabit. One might then ask:

What does a prejudice, assumption, opinion, or belief I hold block me from seeing?

Is a prejudice I cling to a strategy not to face a part of myself that needs to be explored? Is there something or someone I hate that is entangled within a prejudice that haunts me, but I have not been able to face?

Such explorations can be a first step to opening a realm of ourselves we may find rewarding to explore.

Poetic Knowledge as Newsworthy

Originally Published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, October 21, 2023.

It is commonplace for any of us to turn to news channels, newspapers and magazine articles to gain a foothold on what is taking place both locally and internationally. Some perspectives we find helpful, others we may not agree with but read anyway to see what another point of view might teach us if we remain open.

In earlier times, people would often turn to literature, to novels, short stories, and dramas to gain insights into the larger and deeper human condition that is foundational to the actual historical events. Poetry was often consulted as another way to reflect on the facts of history. These earlier wisdom sources are infrequently consulted today as a rich source for human understanding.

Yet many of you know the poetry of one of our finest voices, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. One of his most familiar and often-quoted poems may sound familiar: “The Second Coming.” I have been rereading it lately in the face of so much horror and devastation that seems to be metastasizing into other nations than Israel and Iran. Our own country has its own infectious disruptions that we struggle with, seeking a balance that may include us all. The virus of violence and bloodshed seems to scoff at any boundaries that might contain it.

Yeats’ poem, a mere 21 lines, was written in 1919, just after World War I, which shook the foundation of much of the world. Yeats’ imagery in his exploration seems to be finding new ground in which to be reconsidered. Poetry penetrates deeper than news stories can reach; poetry seeks a deeper truth that is both particular as well as universal in its expression.

Some dominant images emerge early in the poem: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The bold-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned”

The disarray expressed above is closely followed by the following punch line that I have heard in different forms but expressing the same sentiment: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Of course, we know that poetry’s metaphors are not always to be taken literally. But if one meditates on the above lines, what might emerge in their own thinking about the human condition today? What has collapsed that allows the worst to gain such ferocity, such anger and vitriol?

In the second part of the poem, an image begins to take shape that carries a dark power; it plays off the holy presence of Jesus, but now with a terrifying image: “Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” We might question whether what is “surely” coming we agree with. Poems do not lecture or tell us outright what it is; they often work obliquely, catering to the imagination of the reader or listener. They teach rather than preach.

Yeats’ poem then asks us to delve deeper into what the poet envisions: “Somewhere in the sands of the desert/A shape with lion body and the head of a man/…Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/Real shadows of the indignant birds./The darkness drops again; but now I know/That twenty centuries of stony sleep/Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, . . . .”

These lines invite us to look historically to what has been shaping itself into the image that follows. The entire poem up to the last two lines has been prepared so the final image can find its full stature. The topsy-turvy world described above needed to happen first before this ghastly image can achieve its full birthing: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In his wisdom, the poet does not tell us or state it; he leaves it an open question for the reader to see with his own heart what has been unleashed so it can slouch towards its own birth. We might consider whether this is the image that we wish to have prowling in our midst.

Long-Term Friendships Add Texture to Life

Published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung on September 8, 2023.

Recently for personal reasons I had to drop out of attending our 60th. high school reunion in Cleveland, Ohio. I had looked forward to seeing many of the men with whom I attended an all-male Catholic high school, St. Joseph’s. We were a closely-knit group, so to miss seeing them was difficult.

But later, in early August, I flew to Cleveland to visit family, relatives and friends for a week. Seeing all these loved ones face-to-face was an added gift, a simple but profound abundance.

This annual pilgrimage north, however, would not be complete without meeting two friends, Bill and Bob, whose friendships originated in 1953 with Bill (3rd grade) and Bob (5th. Grade) at Holy Cross elementary school in Euclid, Ohio.

In our most recent gathering, and after a few beers, Bill surveyed our long history and concluded that we had had been meeting for 19 years, and always at the same place: Muldoon’s Irish Pub on East 185th. Street in Cleveland.

The geography is no accident, for a little over a mile north on the same street, where it intersects with Lake Shore Blvd. on the Cleveland-Euclid city limit, sits our high school, now renamed Villa Angela-St. Joseph’s High School, now under major renovation.

And less than a mile east of that construction is Holy Cross elementary school where we met and attended classes through 8th. grade under the stern supervision of the Ursuline order of sisters and several lay faculty.  In fact, many who attended either of these schools still live within a few miles of them.

I asked myself, as I flew home to Texas after the week of engaging with so many I love, what is the value of such enduring and endearing friendships?

Long friendships have a way of anchoring us in our evolving history. Even while we don’t communicate often between visits, we carry one another in our imagination and hearts. Affection bonds us and memory unites us in a common heritage.

If one of us hears of the passing of a common acquaintance, we report it to the alumni. These annual visits serve as ritual markers of time’s passing. When we gather, we recollect communally what we thought we had forgotten.

We speak of the women with whom we attended classes in the elementary grades,  who we may have had a crush on, who we dated, and where, if known, they are now. In fact, we find that there are a host of topics yearning to be recollected. Some we never get to. Never mind; Bill and Bob offer yet another version of coming home, of being at home in history.

The intricate webbing of time present resting atop the long history of our lives with one another, as well as the depth of delightful memories, the anguishes of life that have become part of our biographies—all are somehow modified in the sharing.

Our ritual gatherings at the Irish pub, owned, incidentally, by a graduate from the class in front of ours, interlace and speak to one another. I sense that a life of abundance takes up residence right here, where the texture of our shared pasts nod gently to the shortening span of time left to each of us.

Yet within this texture of time and circumstance resides a deep joy at every annual meeting. So much when we meet needs no explanation. When we speak of our own, or the lives of others and how they turned out, what destiny they followed, we are a community of brothers who have walked a similar path in life from pre-adolescence to becoming grandfathers. And, most mysteriously, we always pick up the conversation where we had left off the year before.

Such a journey with “brothers” Bill and Bob offers an abundance that is unique to long friendships; there is no substitute for this treasured form of relationship.