Tuesday, July 22, 2014

God in the Shadows (Essay and Poetry by Bob Racine)



Barbara Brown Taylor has been active in Christian ministry for many years; she is an experienced preacher as well as writer and instructor and has written books through which she has drawn for herself quite a following.  All of them challenge traditional thought about spirituality.  Her latest, which was recently reviewed in Time Magazine, is entitled “Learning to Walk in the Dark.”  In this published treatise she maintains, and this is a quote from that Time Magazine article:  “contemporary spirituality is too feel-good. . .it is sometimes in the bleakest void that God is nearest.”  

Such a notion might sound revolutionary, but it takes little discernment to understand where in the course of human events we run into circumstances which seem to offer some proof of its validity.  For instance, we have reason to be leery when we hear the same well-meaning person, noted for her or his cheery disposition, repeatedly reporting that “I’m doing okay” or “I’m in a pretty good place” or “I’m all right” with no elaboration.  Especially is that true when an unsmiling silence follows the unelaborated claim.  After all, “okay” is not “golly gee wiz wonderful.”  “I’m okay” is sometimes a disguised way of saying “I’m not in the best of places and I don’t want to talk about it.”  I have been guilty of that myself.  The power of positive thinking does not extend as far as denying the unseen burdens of the mind that we all carry, ones that are not unloaded so easily, however many self-help books we have read.  

The larger family I grew up in would never have shared their dark emotions or their stressful experiences with just anyone.  They were very picky and choosy about those to whom they would open up.  They kept such things to themselves; they did not advertise.  Sometimes they even hid themselves away – bodily.  I had three grandparents who were quite practiced at the art of concealment.   They did not reveal facts about themselves that they thought would reflect badly upon them, even if those facts concealed nothing more than that they were as human and subject to weakness and crisis as anyone else.  They had a name to protect, a reputation!  Even if they were in the midst of a trial by fire or an agony of soul and spirit, they did not let too much of the particulars about their condition or situation slip out.  They hedged, they shaded, they modified.  The unwritten guideline was to put on a happy face, cover up the unpleasant.  God will look after me; it will all work out.  The idea that God’s help would come to them not just in the midst of depression or doubt or crisis or confusion but by way of these things was foreign to their thinking.  “What would people think of me, if I were too honest or confessed too much neediness?”     

And the last thing they ever wanted, something to be avoided like the plague, was giving anybody an excuse to feel sorry for them.  Of course, they themselves did not hesitate to feel sorry for others.  They would feel sorry for those poor people over there somewhere – down the block or in another country, wherever.  But nobody better consider them poor and in need of sorry.  A reputation to be shunned!  The refusal to open up and make others a gift of your dark struggle is itself a refusal to love.  I had to grow to adulthood before I knew there was any such thing as the dark night of the soul.

Ms. Taylor points out that people are taught from an early age to fear darkness.  Parents line the pathway to the bathroom with nightlights so that the children can find their way.  Sometimes we even encourage them to sleep with the light of the room on.  This is intended to chase away the closet monsters, to restrain the scary creatures that sneak up on you when you are asleep.  To quote the Time article again: “As we grow older, the monsters take different shape: darkness descends when the call comes that a loved one has cancer, months of unemployment, or a child with an addiction.  Taylor’s own darkness extends to anything that scares her, and that includes the absence of God, dementia, the melting of polar ice caps and what it will feel like to die. . .Our culture’s ability to tolerate sadness is weak.  As individuals, we often run away from it.”  And this is a direct quote from Taylor’s book itself: “We are supposed to get over it, fix it, purchase something, exercise, do whatever it takes to become less sad.”  

Part of Taylor’s discipline is seeking out dark places in which to meditate.  She has spent time in caves.  She takes walks at night (choose your neighborhood carefully, things being as they now are), she watches the moonrise.  She has been known to unplug all the electrical fixtures in her house and abide in that self-imposed darkness for a spell.  She has even sat in her closet with the closet door shut.  She reasons that “God and darkness have been friends for a long time.”  God appeared to Abraham in the night promising him more descendents than the stars he was looking at.  The exodus from Egypt happened at night.  God delivered the Ten Commandments on a dark mountain.  Paul’s conversion happened after he lost his eyesight.  To run from darkness is to run away from God.  And most of the world’s major religions have something to say about finding God in the shadows.

Her most striking statement has to do with feelings of unworthiness due to doubts and fears.  “For many years I thought my questions and my doubt and my sense of God’s absence were all signs of my lack of faith, but now I know this is the way the life of the spirit goes.”  Do we get that?  Doubt and questioning are part and parcel of the spiritual life, not anathema to it.
 
Now this does not mean becoming morbidly fascinated with irksome or depressing or defeatist or negative thoughts.  Wallowing is something else.  I hate to think of how much during my lifetime, when I have been separated from a sense of God, I have spoken or acted in such a way that I have reinforced the negativity of others around me.  I have been the misery that loved the company of other peoples’ misery.  Sometimes we can do this very subtly – a careless look in the eye or a careless little dollop of disdain or fatalism or what might pass for fatalism in voice or attitude.  I don’t think Taylor is talking about that sort of thing – casting a cloak or mantle of bitter-sweetness over everything and everyone.  She speaks of that which she thinks is supposed to be good as a spiritual discipline, not the things that morbid people say and do as a form of self-indulgence.

Of course, the other side of all this is the fact that darkness will not be a gift to us unless we know that is truly what we are experiencing.  People can live in spiritual darkness so long that they cease to realize that that is what it is.  There was a book written during the 1960s with the odd title “Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me!”  The darkness can seem like light.  We humans create big flashy neon signs and cascades of splashy color and artificial illumination to pass for the light that is gone out of us.  Night life per se has never held any fascination for me.  I find it superficial in its promise of freedom and frivolity and relaxation.  But many do chase after it. 

The spiritual life, whatever the form of faith practice, is a mixture of Light and Darkness.  The Apostle Paul hit that nail on the head when he said, “Now we see through a dark reflective glass,” as opposed to whatever we see after we stop breathing.   It does appear that God in a sense expects us to be in the dark – not the darkness engendered by evil but the darkness engendered by partial knowledge.  We have to distinguish between moral darkness and the darkness created by limited understanding, the blurriness of human, finite awareness.           

I once composed this poetic prayer.  In it I talk to Light and Darkness, as if they were persons – Light first, then Darkness.  I end with it:

Oh Light, oh Light,

Under your beam we have felt condemned to work and sweat.  Drenched in the visibility you impart, we have been smug and complacent and imputed to our eyes the wisdom of omniscient gods.  You we sometimes wish to blame for our illusions of grandeur.  Of you we have asked miracles.  You we have expected to free us from fear and loneliness, to cancel out our wounds and our debts, to erase our hatreds, to resolve our dilemmas, to soothe all our qualms.  You we want to hold accountable for our happiness, for the enlivening of expectation, for salvation, for the utopia of which we never cease to dream.  We have silently chastised you for your alleged desertion of us, when without your resistance you give place to Darkness and seemingly abandoned us to it.  But in this moment we know that you are indeed unique among blessings, not the be-all and end-all of them. 

Without you we would never know delirious joy and passion.  Under your bright fire we are incited to run and walk and dance and jump.  By you our energies are called forth.  We go forth to explore, to experience, to discover, to create.  By your lamp we build, we rearrange the universe in search of healing enterprises and arrangements of matter and phenomena that portend justice and productivity on behalf of human need.  Under your aegis, oh Light, we know love.  We see our fellow creatures at their noble best.

It is you who illumines the path along which peoples and nations encounter each other.  Among your grand entourage our hands see to reach out and touch surfaces and shapes and the warm satisfaction of other hands, other hearts, other kinships of need reaching for us.  From your infusion we gain confidence.  In your radiant, enervating ambience we fling ourselves into labors of love, undergo the reward of accomplished pursuits and catharses that enlighten our whole being.

You, oh Light, have shown us wonders we cannot comprehend.  You have raised us to pinnacles of truth.  By you we obtain visions and learn to walk the world in faith.
         
Oh Darkness, oh, Darkness,

You have made us tremble.  Under your spell we have imagined shapeless and faceless horrors.  In your deep bosom we have known the meaning of fear and doubt, our eyes sealed shut by shadows that cannot be erased.  We have thought of you as evil, a friend only to demons and workers of iniquity.  To you we have brought our fatigue, our stress, our sulking hatreds, our languor, and our deep and abiding suspicions.  You have been our mute and captive audience.  In your hearing we have soliloquized grievances with the world that the world will never hear. 

Often we have ignored you and spurned you with our weaponry of artificial light.  Our noise, our caprices, our frantic restlessness driving us to indulgence of body and mind beyond moderation have helped us forget you were there at all.  But we know that you are a blessing, not a scourge, that whatever horror there may be is in us.  We have taught ourselves fear and doubt.  Shadows are of our own making, if indeed they are not the chosen object of our fascination and sometime obsession.  The evil we know is not your creation.  It is we who befriend iniquity.

You, oh Darkness, we have come to love so late.  Late in our lives we have made peace with you and heard your message to us in the midnight beating of our hearts.  Without you we would never have known introspection.  Because of you we have eyes within as well as without.  It is you who leads us to take comfort from solitude.  It is you who draws us closer to loved ones, who catalyzes us toward intimacy and sleep and meditative second thoughts.  It is you, Darkness, who breaks the fevered thrust of our momentum and puts us in gentle touch with our mortality.  Under your inspiration we wrestle and subdue the urgencies of conscience and flesh and private dilemma.  Without duress or chicanery you allow us to see ourselves in the mirror of disquietude and find strength to ennoble our own quiet needing.  By your silent blanketing of our eyes, our window of the soul, you inspire us to find our own way to God’s illuminating presence.

Darkness and Light – Light and Darkness, we bless you both.  We embrace you both.  We acknowledge your dual power and press on with endless vigor to give it shape all the days and nights of our lives.  Amen!


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Her (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                             2 hrs & 6 min, color, 2013

“Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever going to feel, and from here on out I’m not going to feel anything new.”  The man who utters these words goes by the name of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a computer processor in a society at some distance into the future.  His specific function is the writing of letters on behalf of faceless individuals who do not wish to compose their own, intended for relatives or wives or lovers or friendly acquaintances of those persons, who are equally unknown to him.  What appears to be a task that links our man to a sizeable assortment of humanity is in actuality a lonely profession.  He is in effect a ghost writer, and the danger of ghost writing is the possibility that you yourself will become a ghost, a lifeless functionary without solidity of purpose or solidarity of form.  Apparently in his many composings he feels as if he has exhausted his cache of originality, emptying himself of self.  That he is in the final stages of getting divorced adds to his sense of quandary.                 

We have seen the likes of him in many motion pictures of the last fifty years.  An introspective soul yearning for connection, particularly romantic connection, but unable to master the art of intimacy, and let us make no mistake about it, creating intimacy is an art.  But in this futuristic society, something has become scientifically possible that offers the Theodores of the world a way to cope, if only for a limited time.  It is called “the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system.”  Its purveyors claim that it is not just a system but “a form of consciousness.”   One can create through computer ingenuity a lover or companion of one’s choosing, an operational system (os for short) that speaks in a voice already equipped and toned exactly to fit the fantasy composition of the receiver’s mind and imagination.  The unseen personality is constructed out of Theodore’s answers to leading questions about his life and background, fed into the circuitry, clues to what he would like his intimacy partner to be, and it is all done within seconds. 

Before he knows it, he is speaking to Samantha, a friendly, relaxed voice (provided by Scarlett Johansson) that (or maybe we should say who) relates to him and coaxes him into a form of sharing he has never really known.  She has been constructed just for him.  She exists to bring him and him alone the joy of companionship.  They can call on each other any hour of the day or night, and do.  She projects the aura of a very strong, imaginative personality and intelligence and comes with her own varied, human-like emotions.  She can even make things happen on line that he does not instruct her to make happen.  Whatever she does, however, is done for the purpose of pleasing him.  In time they fall in love (an apparently unusual development), and that is when the way becomes somewhat slippery for both of them. 

I have had conversations with several people about the future depicted in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as compared with the twenty-first century as it has really evolved.  We have a space station, and voice print identification has come about in some places.  What has not come to pass is the travel of humans to other planets, though there are trends that are leading in that direction.  One phenomenon, however, that plays a big part in the story and I hope NEVER materializes is HAL, the computer that not only talks but takes on human emotion and the capability of independent thought and action.  As most of you surely know, HAL turns psychotic and becomes murderous.  I know that when Samantha started to speak and act, a slight shudder passed through me recollecting the fiasco that HAL’s form of artificial intelligence becomes.  That is one eventuality I would take great pleasure in averting altogether.  My prayer to God is: “Please let computers remain what they are – inanimate machines that work according to designs that humans conceive and control, however advanced and however fanciful their encasements turn out to be and however rapidly they are equipped to produce results.  May their “voices” always be limited to digital transcription and computation.  Please, no mimicking of the moods and whims and volatilities of the human species!” 

I am pleased to report that nothing horrific takes place in “Her.”  Only pains of the heart do we experience with Theodore, as he becomes involved with his os, who proves to be far more of a human challenge than he might have guessed.  Early in the story she tells him that she is afraid that she is going to feel nothing more than what she has been programmed to feel.  This remark gives us an advanced clue about the complication his involvement with her is certain to become.  We know at once that she will exceed all the specifications of her creators.

The set decoration by Allen Coulter, the art direction by Austin Gorg and the overall production designing by K.K. Barrett demand from me a very special mention.  Some of the most singularly inspired work in these domains that I have ever absorbed – far out, but not that far out – has been perfected. 

A genius named Spike Jonze is responsible for the creation of “Her.”  Both the screenplay (for which he won an Oscar) and the directing are his alone.  His dialogue is keen-edged, transparent and extraordinarily intelligent.  Aside from emotionally gripping and spell-casting, the picture is quite amusing.  I would call it a situational comedy-drama, the laughs inherent in the situation.  For instance, Theodore sounds unintentionally funny when he speaks with his ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) about his new flame and just casually mentions that she is an os.  In this future society it appears that os’s have become a commonplace option widely employed, hence his matter-of-factness in disclosing her computerized identity.  And that is not the only fun Jonze has with his disembodied female, but he never comes anywhere close to campy ridiculousness.  There is a purity of form from which he never deviates and which he never compromises.  He makes us believe in the simple process being depicted, however fantastic it may seem to us.                       

The performances are uniformly superb as well.  Phoenix in low key hits his mark during every emotional encounter, generating great sympathy.   He never looks or sounds silly.  Amy Adams adds to her trove of good characterizations as the wife of a friend who, subsequent to her breakup with her husband, also enlists the support of an os.  And Scarlett Johansson, though never seen, is dynamic in her portrayal.  Samantha will be hard to forget.   

A real mind-bender as well as rib tickler and heart tugger!  A somewhat rare combination!

 
To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.