3 posts tagged “fear”
-- Leslie Silko
Ceremony
"Theological reflection is the discipline of exploring individual and corporate experience in conversation with the wisdom of a religious heritage. The conversation is a genuine dialogue that seeks to hear from our own beliefs, actions, and perspectives, as well as those of the tradition. It respects the integrity of both. Theological reflection therefore may confirm, challenge, clarify, and expand how we understand our own experience and how we understand the religious tradition. The outcome is new truth and meaning for living."
--John DeBeer
The Art of Theological Reflection
*****
From Scott Horton's Blog
No Comment:
Tucholsky’s Liberal Moment
. . . And when everything has passed by–; when everything has run its full course: the herd mentality, the bliss of mass rallies at which slogans are shouted and flags are waived; when this illness of our times, which transforms through its lies the baser qualities of the people into noble ones, has passed on; when the people are perhaps not smarter, but are tired; when all the engagements over fascism have been fought to their conclusion and the last liberal emigrants have left our shores–:
Then, one day it will suddenly become fashionable to be a liberal.
And then someone will arise who will make a thundering discovery: he will discover the Individual. He will say: There is an organism, called the human being, and our life revolves around him. Whether he is happy, that is the question. That he is free—that is the object. Groups are something secondary. The State is something secondary. We should not be focused on the success of the State, but rather of the Individual.
The man who speaks in this manner will produce a great effect on his audience. The people will cheer these themes and will say: “That’s something new! What courage! We’ve never heard anything quite like that before! A new era of humanity is coming! What a genius we have among us! A new way of thinking is born–!”
His books will be bestsellers, or more precisely the books of his imitators, since the first is of course always a bit of a dim bulb.
And this new theory will have its way: a hundred thousand black, brown and red shirts will be driven to the margins and onto the dust heap. And the people will once more have the courage to be themselves, without majority decrees and without fear of the State, before which they had knuckled under like whipped dogs. And that will continue, until one day. . .
–Kurt Tucholsky, Blick in ferne Zukunft (1931) in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, p. 212-13 (1972)(S.H. transl.)
[Permanent link]Here's Needleman:
THE FEAR OF THE FUTURE AND THE HABIT OF WORRYING
The strange story of Kirzai may be taken as a message to us from the ancient wisdom about the normal relationship to our own individual future. The young Kirzai sacrifices his immediate gain to help a man whom he does not consciously recognize, but who in face is himself grown old. "The desert will repay you," say the old Kirzai after drinking the water given to him by his younger self and then mounting his camel. It is all he can say and all he needs to say.
The desert will repay you: it is these words and their many-layered meaning that we can bring to the second aspect of our contemporary pathology of time -- the habit of worrying. Find a man or woman who is too busy and you are certain to find an individual who always worries. Yes, as we shall see, from the most ancient times wisdom has been trying to teach mankind that the future obeys laws that are far different than we can imagine. When we worry, we are assuming we know what is likely to happen in the future and our emotions are employing thought in order to deal in imagination with this presumed future before it happens.
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If we observe ourselves when we are worrying, we may see that what we feel is strongly akin to the profound sense of loneliness that afflicts so many of us in our modern culture. When I worry, I feel cut off from my life -- and this sense of being cut off from life is practically a definition of loneliness. It is quite different when we are confronting genuine dangers and genuine possibilities -- that is, possibilities that reflect reality and the real world. Fear of genuine, possible danger, from either nature or people is never a waste of time or energy. On the contrary, such fear engages us in the world of real forces, a world in which we may be defeated but never isolated. "Fear" and "sorrow" are words reflecting man's painful but meaningful encounter with the real world; anxiety and nervousness reflect our capture by a meaningless imaginary reality invented by the mind in service to the revolving automatisms of emotional reaction. In the state of worrying, there is no such thing as thinking in the fully human sense. In this state, thought, which is meant to inform us about the real world, becomes instead a puppet of the emotional reactions.
At this point the ancient wisdom advises us to develop in ourselves an instrument for real thinking and vision, the instrument of the mind, for which man was created. The future simply cannot be seen with the egoistic or anxious mind. We are on earth to do things that only human beings can do, but none of them can be done until we are able to think as a grown-up man or woman thinks. Worrying is not thinking.
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There is a remarkable passage about man's relationship to the future in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It occurs in his most famous essay, "The Over-Soul." In this early work, first published when he was thirty-seven years old, Emerson announces the great, underlying theme that forms the basis of everything he was to write in his long, prodigiously productive life. The idea of the Over-Soul is that the universe, the greatness of nature, is everywhere penetrated by an invisible, conscious Selfhood upon which it, nature, depends. The greatness of nature is this Selfhood in its manifestation. The uniqueness of man is that he is given the possibility and the duty consciously to attend to this Selfhood, this soul, within himself, and to sense throughout his life that this soul is himself. "Man," writes Emerson, "is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence." Then, speaking of man's relationship to time, he goes on:
"The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies is the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other ..... We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence .......to which every part and particle is related; the eternal ONE....
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And now, speaking specifically of man's relationship to the future, Emerson offers an extraordinary vision of what is means that the future is unknown to us -- what this obvious fact means and what this intrinsic unknowability of the future calls on us to search for within ourselves. In what Emerson writes, we shall see the astonishing idea that the future is unknown in the same sense that the Self is unknown! To remember is the same mystery as to foretell! What we are to be is the same thing as that which we have always been -- in our depths.
(More tomorrow , following Needleman's idea of the prophetic and our relationship to the future)
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From Thomas Merton's "A Book of Hours"
"What Merton learned, he taught -- that the epiphany of God in time can come to us at any moment, anywhere, whether we are praying or not. It can come at work, on the road, in any situation, because it is a deep and secret movement of the divine spirit within our own, the felt sense of God's own self-discovery in us. The life of contemplation prepares us for such intervals of divine encounter, creating a new experience of time: "le temps vierge" -- one's own time felt at once as abundant fullness and profound emptiness. Like the enigmatic "point vierge," its temporal analog is a point of "nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being." It is an incomparable point of contact with mystery by which we pass through the center of our own nothingness and enter into infinite reality to awaken as our true self.
Le temps vierge is the time of openness to all that is just as it is. It is healing time when some great and secret mercy works miracle in our woundedness, and so it is compassionate time. In this space of liberty, free of the demands of the world and the ego, all possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices become manifest in a moment of pure potential. This is the different wisdom Merton harvested from the seeds of contemplation nurtured in the soil of the present moment, the near frontier of eternity. In his moments of real presence he came to see what is our to see as well in the temps vierge of quiet praise:
in emptiness.
The silence of the spheres in the music of
a wedding feast.
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena
of life,
the more we analyze them out into strange finalities
and complex purposes of our own,
the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and
despair.
But it does not matter much,
because no despair or ours can alter the
reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always
there.
Indeed we are in the midst of it,
and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we
want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget
ourselves on purpose,
cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the
general dance.
--Thomas Merton
By Michael Leunig
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We simplify our lives.
We live gladly with less.
We let go the illusion that we can possess.
We create instead.
We let go the illusion of mobility.
We travel in stillness. We travel at home.
By candlelight and in stillness,
In the presence of flowers,
We make our pilgrimage.
We simplify our lives.
Empty space tends to create fear. As long as our minds, hearts and hands are occupied we can avoid confronting the painful questions, to which we never gave much attention and which we do not want to surface. “Being busy” has become a status symbol, and most people keep encouraging each other to keep their body and mind in constant motion. Occupation and not empty space is what most of us are looking for. When we are not occupied we become restless. We even become fearful when we do not know what we will do the next hour, the next day or the next year. Then occupation is called a blessing and emptiness a curse.
Many telephone conversations start with the words: “I know you are busy, but…” and we would confuse the speaker and even harm our reputation were we to say, “Oh no, I am completely free, today, tomorrow and the whole week.” Our client might well lose interest in one who has so little to do.
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