With daylight savings time, I woke late this morning, read the front page of the news with a cup of tea, and quietly went upstairs for a few minutes of meditation - when, halfway through, I realized that I had an appointment downtown, 10 minutes ago. Stopping everything, I rain downstairs, grabbed what I needed ( I was helping to move someone from an apartment), jumped in the car and hit a button for a radio station.  It was just as the half hour news program was on, and in my agitated state, what was being said made me more agitated - angry, in fact.  Simmering for about half a minute, I had the clarity to turn it off.  Why listen to the news if it serves only to "harsh my buzz"?  Calmness immediately began to seep in with the warming spring-like sun that was rising over the hill in a milky blue sky.  Ahhh!  

This may seem like a know-nothing attitude to take about the news - we must stay informed! - but I have had a revelatory experience with the news before.  I have told it here before, but I will briefly mention it again: while doing fieldwork in Venezuela, I was with a group of Indians in the far off backwaters, so far off that not even morning AM transmissions could come in on the radio. For 6 months, I had absolutely no knowledge of world happenings. Then we had to get a flight back to Caracas for goods and permits and the like.  Arriving in the incredible noise that is the underdeveloped world's city trademark (half of all vehicles apparently have no mufflers!), I first went to get a cafe con leche, and next bought a paper.  Oh, the strife! The world was coming to an end!  It would take me two days to understand, as a revelation, that this is what the news always did - create panic and noise.  That was in 1989.  The world has somehow managed to put on another 25 years since.

But not without the panic button permanently pressed.  Having grown up in the white-hot era of the cold war, there was never a time when the world was not about to end.  It is, again, about to end - let me NOT count the ways.  And it was this morning that I realized what happens in such a milieu, whether on purpose or not: the exciting controversies are given, people get angry and choose sides, and then those organizations who push for one side or the other get busy, selling THEIR side in the midst of our anger.  In short, we are manipulated.  In short, we are made to pay attention to what the News sees fit to print, and then are hustled into our respective corners for the fight, which seldom leads to a victory for the betterment of humankind, but rather for some organization's or individual's interests, often at humankind's expense.

In Thomas Merton's book, "The Sign of Jonas," he tells how he had to go to Louisville from his abbey for some official business. It was the first time in 7 years (!) that he had left the monastery, and he was mildly surprised at what he found in the greater world.  He thought, he said, that he would be disgusted with the ant-like hustle of our busy world, but instead found himself feeling a loving pity - for us.  Before he had left The World 7 years before, he had done so as a flight; 7 years later, he found that he had, instead, re-discovered the world - not its excitement and struggle, but rather the humanity behind the people he had once seen only as a confused crowd.  There were real people behind each and every face in the crowd, and he understood that, as one only can after one has become detached from the sometimes real, and other times manufactured, drama on the human stage.  With that, instead of seeing a stage of nations and races and ideologies pitted against one another, he found only humanity, what (as Merton understands it) is only one soul struggling for clarity, for reality, for God, one person at a time.

Not that he was unaware of doomsday.  He wrote from the late 1940's, after the USSR had obtained the A-bomb and begun to engage the USA for world dominance.  It was assumed then, so shortly after WWII, that we would most certainly go to war again, and this time with nuclear weapons.  As he writes: soon, the last human left after all the fire and death will find one more bomb which he will be unable to resist setting off, and we will all be gone.  This was not said in anguish; rather, for him, the world was always going to end in fire.  Such is man's nature, as long as he remains imperfect and detached from God.  This is not Merton's issue; rather, it is to become attached to God, to will only His will.  All else is small potatoes.  

I don't believe I could become so detached as Merton, but he is right in the long-haul.  All of us will face our Armageddon at the end of our lives, where we will be held accountable in some way for our lives in our death.  The News, whether big or small, is not the workings of our inner development, but rather a play of power and money and interests that should not detract from our individual inner improvement.  Truly we could save the world if all of us turned inward in such a way, but this might be only a Utopian dream.  Still, we are accountable to ourselves.  The world rages on, as always, but our first matter of business is in ourselves, and then in how our interior changes affect the exterior.  As Merton showed, the inner changes can make all the difference for the outer man.  These are what count.  All else, from his perspective, is just selling the news.  FK                              

Today, a new chapter in "Hurricane River", "Three Amigos," under "Hurricane River" in the website.  FK 

My father would often tell us a story when we were older about his Irish Catholic mother's dream - for her son to become a priest. She thought he was a shoe-in.  The only boy in the family, it was to him that they turned for most of the unpleasant jobs, and he always responded without complaint.  He was unerringly polite to his elders, a good student and athlete, and a regular attendant to the mandatory masses.  Or so she thought, but I believe it; and it would have been a tremendous feather in the family's cap to finally have a priest arise from among them.  

The only problem was, my father was appalled at the idea.  He wanted an active life, dating, the adventure of making it in the world on his own and so on.  Still his mother would look at him knowingly, knowing that God would certainly choose this wonderful son for His service, and she would often tell him so: just wait, my son, and you will get the Calling.  

And so my father anxiously spent his time in church or any such ecclesiastic endeavor trying his best NOT to hear God.  It was my theory that it was this that kept my father from having spiritual experiences, and helped turn him from religion to agnosticism in his later years, but that is just a theory.  The hard reality is, that he didn't want the Calling, as most do not.  The life of a Catholic priest is one of denial and obedience, not something that a good American boy, with prospects abounding all around him, would choose, as fewer and fewer do.

So in reading Thomas Merton's journal of life in a monastery, "The Sign of Jonas," I found myself wondering time and again: how could he do it?  This, a man born into a fairly well-off family, well educated and talented with prospects through the sky; why would he choose such a life?  For it was not just to the priesthood that he aspired, but a life as a contemplative in a Trappist monastery (Gethsemane) in Kentucky.  

His diary tells the story: rise and shine at 3AM to go to mass (vespers?) in an unheated church; hours more prayer, hours more writing (which he resented), 7 or 8 hours more in physical labor on the communal farm; minimal food, no vices, no parties, no conversation except with the spiritual advisers, no entertainment of any sort.  And to this, his complaint was that it wasn't hard enough!  That he had wanted complete isolation for contemplation, and the Trappists kept him too busy with other things and people!  It was only through his training in obedience, he claimed, that he did not run off to an austere hermitage, for his spiritual advisers claimed that he had another calling, with writing, although he did not want it.  

The world is grateful that Merton's superiors saw it that way, for he has left us with inspiring and very human accounts of struggles with the ego and will that prevented him, and by extension, prevents all of us, from union with God.  More than anything else, though, this shows the power of the Calling.  My father needn't have worried; if God had wanted him, he would have wanted God.  Merton makes it very clear that it is, at least in the end, that simple.

In reading the first 60 pages last night, I marveled at his convictions, but also was able to see a little of myself in him, as if I were, spiritually, Merton's Mini-Me.  I, too, have had moments when I have seen that being with God, that spiritual presence that goes far beyond the images made of IT, is all that matters; I, too, have had times when I have wished to get rid of everything and lead an absolutely simple life; and I, too, have wanted only peace and quiet at times, which I often get in the cabin up north, where I am left alone with only myself and the Presence.  But those moments quickly pass.  For many young men, the monastic life is most appalling because it denies sexual intimacy.  At age 60, I can now see past that, although it would still be a trial.  But because I can see past that most obvious omission in life now, I can also see that such a life is difficult for reasons that reach far beyond  abstinence.  To give one's life to Spirit as Merton did is to give over all desires, possessions, distractions and entertainment, and even external will, for the spiritual directors decide all, in the end.  

And yet Merton sought that and more.  In those moments of spiritual understanding, I understand; otherwise I look at his life as a waste (I know it wasn't, but it is an emotional thing.  No family, children, exciting vacations, and so on - doesn't it seem a waste from our normal perspective?)  But that is what most of us are up against: spirit or the world.  We cannot, as Jesus said, serve two masters, and yet we try.  The monks are called to try much more than the rest of us, and yet most would tell us in the end that they have mostly failed - that they were never able to blend perfectly their own will with the will of Divinity.  We are told that once we did, in the perfect world of Eden.  Now, it seems next to impossible.

It was said by one man that I read that someone who was truly in tune with God was worth hundreds of aid workers in the help done for humanity.  It is this that Merton, given his desire and need for humility, would not admit. But for every physical charity given, how many more people have been helped by the words of Merton?  For in the end, we come to see that life is not about anything beyond the most basic of necessary things; rather, it is about reuniting with God, and it is through such people as the Trappists that we learn it is possible, and wise.  And we learn this most through the strength of the Calling.  All should likely fear it, as my father did, for it is stronger than any worldly desire; but it also shows that there is something greater than the desires of the physical and social man - and also that something lies ahead for us that is far greater than anything we can want or posses in our daily lives.  FK           

   

Last week a big fuss was made over a striped dress: was it blue and black or gold and white (or some such combinations)?  In the full light of day, it was the darker colors, but in other light, most, including myself, saw it as white and gold.  Ophthalmologists weighed in - those who saw it in the darker colors in a certain light, even though those were correct, had a yellow-green color blindness.  Thus, in what I read, it was explicitly tied to the eye-brain physiological structure.

However, the event sparked other comments, the most notable (for me) discussing the color blue.  Blue, said many experts quoted in the piece, was never mentioned in early texts such as the the Odyssey (instead, we had the "bright" sky and the "wine dark" sea), nor in all but a few instances, if I remember correctly, in the Old Testament.  Ethnographic accounts were used to back this up, showing us that many primitive peoples, and some tribal peoples today, do not have a word for "blue." More importantly, and astonishingly, they did or do not even recognize the color blue.

The idea is an old one.  The Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, brought forth in the 1930's, stated that words and syntax showed what people recognized, and people recognized what they had words and linguistic structure for.  Other properties or ideas, then, were either poorly understood or absent entirely from the conscious mind.  What Sapir and Whorf had in mind, after studying the Indians of the American South West, was even more far-reaching than colors; for instance, even the notion of  time was locked into a language, and the language locked people into that notion of time.  To the Zuni, time was not sequential but circular.  It was in their syntax, and affected how they led their lives.  The 9 to 5 world we live in was a  wonder and a puzzle to them, just as their's was to us.   Volition was also different - they would not say that a donkey kicked someone, but that a kick happened from the donkey - and so on.  Subtle but very meaningful differences affecting the nature of morality and nature itself.

These concepts might have even greater implications - for our own trajectory, or evolution as a species that reach beyond words to fundamental concepts.  For instance, for all but a spiritual elite, the idea of one god - or monotheism - was a wrenching concept, one that did not match with the more obvious idea of a world filled with separate qualities, with each having its own spirit.  Yet the one-god concept was necessary - essential, I believe - to create the notion of universal (spiritual) equality of men and women. This, too, was a wrenching concept, even for those of the monotheistic religions.  And yet one led to the other, as a matter of deep inner logic - if we were all of one God, we were all of a piece, and equally worthy.  Today, regardless of one's overall beliefs, the idea of this type of equality is taken for granted by much of the contemporary world.  Many might not know that it took eons to develop this thought that brought about the American Declaration of Independence, the United Nations, and at least the idea that all humans have basic rights.  Such a notion only a century ago would have been met with astonishment or peals of laughter by much of the world, which lived in groups almost universally called - by themselves that is - "The People," or the chosen ones.

The greater question is: are we being led as a species to expand our grasp of reality, or is our reality expanding only in one direction in response to an increasingly interdependent world? On the side of the latter, we can see that we have lost as much as we have gained in modernity - who among us can track a deer over rock and through water?  Who can intuit a tsunami or great storm hours before it happens without meteorological instruments, as many traditional people can do today?  And who can steer a canoe across thousands of miles of ocean by the feel of the waves, as the Polynesians once did?

On the other hand, these lost abilities also point to a more unified world - if those who had them could understand that, which they often did not.  If one knows that all is connected, one can tell from some things that other things are about to happen; and yet, the concept of human unity in a real sense was missing.  We might then say that these abilities were expanded to a universal moral level - and in that, we have positive evolution, for greater knowledge might be tracked best by how we understand the relationship between more and more things and processes - until we reach the hypothetical gold standard of the Theory of Everything; and not just every THING, but everything, including concepts of god, humans, and morality. For as the color blue shows, and Sapir and Whorf hypothesized, it is the concepts themselves that give us what we know of our reality.  And once we know that, our ability to transform the world into a desired reality is expanded almost infinitely.  FK