the cassandra pages

via negativa

After reading the comments on the previous post, a word of explanation seems to be required. "Looking into the dark and listening to silence" is not a metaphor for depression, it's just another way of talking about the via negativa, the spiritual path that has appealed to countless mystics over the ages, as well as folks like Dave and me. From the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, to St. John of the Cross, to Thomas Merton, as well as many Buddhist scholars, the via negativa has been a fruitful way of seeking and speaking about spiritual truths.

For people unfamiliar with this term, the via negativa means looking for answers about God and existence in "what is not" rather than saying “God is this, and God is this”, or declaring “here are the answers”, or “sign this pledge, join this organization, say these words and find salvation.” Words like "dark" and "silence" are metaphors for the obscurity one faces when pursuing this path. One throws out previous conceptions, and approaches "God" in what can NOT be seen, felt, heard, touched, rather than trying to define and describe the Holy in normal terms related to everyday life. This does not mean that we don’t see God as being “light” or “Love”, and it certainly doesn’t mean that a person drawn to this path is miserable and unable to laugh or sing – quite the opposite. It means more that God, approached in this way, is increasingly undefinable, unknowable, exceeding our human concepts, impossible to quantify. That does not mean, however, that one feels small and insignificant by comparison; in fact, this “dark” path tends to illuminate the ways in which God is everywhere, interpenetrating all of existence, filling ourselves and others and the spaces between beings. It is akin to much of Buddhist thought and yet, in the Christian form, we do find something we call “God” in that emptiness.

Another characteristic of the via negativa is that it is just about impossible to talk about. This is the realm of paradox ("one must lose one's life in order to find it") and metaphor ("for the moon there is the cloud"), of experience rather than words, of uncodified truths rather than dogma and doctrine. Normal verbal prayer becomes redundant when one realizes that everything is already known, including our thoughts; the seeker who empties herself in silence becomes a vessel to be filled as well as an overflowing cup, linked to the inexhaustible source of all that is. Rather than finding easy answers that one day may prove to be insufficient or false, one realizes that this is a path that never ends; that on it one may continue and grow in wisdom throughout an entire lifetime, while realizing, paradoxically, that one actually knows less and less! It is not, however, easy; one has to be content with questions rather than answers, with obscurity and things half-seen, with a “sense” of things rather than proof; and it is also solitary, though one tends to find companions along the way. The via negativa does not negate beauty, life, light, and love; in fact it is a way to begin to see and embody them as they really are, existing side-by-side with their opposites, no longer denied but accepted and held, gently, in the other hand.

Ecstatic

Snowy nighttime street from inside a bus stop, Montreal

"Feeling down? Look up! -love, God." So read the sign-on-wheels outside Praise Chapel last night. I laughed and shook my head, as I usually do when I read those messages - is there a book somewhere, or a website, that has weekly suggestions for public Praise signage? They're clever, simplistic, and so totally non-Episcopalian.

I've been spending a lot of my own time lately writing about evangelical opposition to homosexuality, based on strict biblical literalism. And then there was that night at the Pentecostal church, and teju cole's recent comments about religion in Nigeria. My patience for the Jesus crowd has worn fairly thin, but I do see why people gravitate that way. Lots of people want simple answers, and this is a big one, in eight-inch letters. Praise Jesus. Amen, Jesus. He will wipe every tear from your eye.

John Fortunato, a gay therapist who wrote a book back in the 80s about gays, emotional health, and spirituality called Embracing the Exile (unfortunately out of print), had quite a bit to say about why we feel spiritual hunger. He was a Christian, not a Buddhist, but he talks a lot about ego and attachment, and how they bind us to a cycle of anxiety.

We begin by clinging tenaciously to our egos. We are in control. Then we create in our world systems and structures that we can manipulate and control to somehow bury the reality that we truly control nothing.

…whether or not (we) consciously grasp (our) yearning as a need for spiritual grounding, the cry into the abyss is an acknowledgment that the only way out is deeper.

That sounds familiar to me. But a lot of folks aren't headed into the deep water. They are safely splashing, it seems to me, in the wading pool. I went to a musical play at Praise Chapel one time; the pastor, who I know, had invited the community and I felt like I should go. Different people from the congregation played the various parts. The story, a sort of Nutcracker spin-off, was about toys who came to life at Christmas and were able to talk. One was a broken doll, very beautiful, who had only one arm. She prayed to Jesus, and all the other dolls prayed with her, and a miracle happened - a new arm appeared and she was whole and healed! The Praise congregation clapped and cried at that point in the story; this was how it worked, it was how it was going to work for them. Their faces glowed with happiness.

There's a school associated with this chapel, and the students, like the congregation, include many people who are the rejects of society, as well as kids from broken families with innumerable problems. I admire the dedication of the teachers and the pastor; they are living their faith in a real way and they are helping people feel loved as well as building community. How can I criticize that? It just astounds me that the hook is this promise of healing, of wealth, of you-name-the-miracle -- and that it can be believed by so many people. Yet, looking around at today's world and our lack of control and the anxiety it generates, I can see the attraction.

For the person, though, whose mind has been sufficiently changed by education and experience and thought about how the world actually works, the only choices are stoic self-sufficiency, or plunging ever deeper. Feeling down? Look. Keep looking into the dark and listening to silence. Not, as they say, for the faint of heart.

Not Going Backwards

A fine French cat who has nothing whatsoever to do with the following post.

A slate of four nominees for the next presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church was announced today; this article gives more information on each. In the wake of all the controversy over Gene Robinson's election, there's been a lot of speculation and gossip about who would be nominated and what those nominations might portend, but I was very happy to see that for the first time, one nominee is a woman, and none of them are arch conservatives. (One voted against Gene's election, and none of the four were present at his consecration.) Already today, church traditionalists were complaining mightily about the nominees because none of them were members of their camp, ready to "lead the church back to orthodoxy".

It's amazing how much publicity mean-spirited rabble-rousers are able to get in this country when they're all worked up, especially about sex. The predicted mass exodus from the Episcopal Church simply has not happened, but from the amount of press the story has gotten over the past two years, you'd think the whole thing was going to collapse. While I would have liked to see a more actively progressive slate of nominees, I was still happy to see that one is female, and that none are retrograde - which means that the church at large probably has the backbone, along with the House of Bishops, to stick to its basic principles and look forward on issues of justice and inclusion rather than bowing to pressure from either the fundamentalist fringes, or the Anglican Communion and Canterbury, to preserve the institution at all costs.

I'm proud of that.

Shaking the Rafters

I know, that's an odd headline, since it's been so quiet around here. I've been really focussed on my writing, since I'm on the homestretch now. Last week I got the final chapter (s?) organized and started writing, including one quiet and productive afternoon spent in the Bibliotheque. Our terrible weather continued until late yesterday; today is bright and sunny and I can't wait to go out for a walk although I'm sure it is really cold.

Last night we went with friends to a Gospel concert at a Pentecostal church in another part of the city - and it was quite an experience. The concert was a benefit for one of the church members, a woman who is a preacher and singer who is raising money to cut her first CD. She was the main performer but didn't appear until the third hour; before that we heard maybe eight other singers, small groups and choruses, interspersed with a little preaching and humor and warmth from the two MCs, a large wide woman and a very skinny tall man, both with great singing voices too. There was an often-stated understanding that they see and intend the music they make to be a ministry; not commercial. The congregation was entirely black - in addition to the four of us there were maybe four other white people there - and everyone was dressed up for the occasion and ready to "praise" - which they did. or maybe I should say, we did, since it was impossible to keep hands and feet still. By the end, everyone was up on their feet, dancing and singing. The atmosphere was a combination of reverent and ecstatic  - these folks are serious about their personal relationship with Jesus and praising God, which was pretty much the extent of the message we heard. And music is their medium. There were some wonderful voices, and one performance in particular, by a woman who came out of the backup gospel chorus of about a dozen women dressed in cream-colored satin blouses and long brown skirts, all different, was extraordinary. She had a fantastic voice, and sang a song called "City of God", about a vision of heaven, and not only got totally into it vocally, but ended up on her knees on the stage, hands up, belting out the chorus with eyes closed while the whole audience swayed, on their feet, hands raised, singing with her in reprise after reprise.

I'm an Episcopalian, but I grew up with Gospel music, at least in its northern, white church version. My paternal grandfather, born in the 1880s, was a Methodist minister who, in hsi young days, had been a circuit-rider, traveling from church to church for revival meetings in the upper reaches of Appalachia in northen Pennsylvania and southern New York. In my father's family, everyone sang and played instruments, and my father and his brothers and sister often performed in church as a Gospel quartet. As a young person I was often at the piano harmonizing with my Dad on old Methodist and Gospel hymns like "In the Garden" and "His Eye is on the Sparrrow", and we still love to do that when we get together. So although I may have spent my adulthood singing liturgical works by Mozart and Fauré, I'm not snobby about church music so long as it's not the repetitive, insipid, mindless dreck that's billed as "contemporary praise music" these days in mainline churches. Singing along last night and getting up and dancing in the pew cheered me up after a long week. The message -- well, I have some problems there. And without hearing any real sermonizing, I wasn't sure what kind of theology this particular church represented. But for one evening, I wanted to suspend any judgement and just enjoy, observe, and allow myself to be touched by the simple faith and generosity that flowed out of all the singing throats, reminded of the significant role Gospel played my own musical formation. Nevertheless, it felt like an evening immersed in a totally different culture.

The final chorus was still rolling when we stepped out into the cold snowy air at 10:00 pm. Our friends' friend, who had told them about the concert, followed us out to thank us for coming. He was a handsome man in a suit; his wife  - petite, very pretty, with a glowing face - had been one of the singers in the gospel chorus. Together, they clean our friends' apartment each week.

"Solidarité météorologique"

Yesterday was one of the worst weather-days I've yet experienced in Montreal. Pouring rain fell on top of ice-covered sidewalks and streets, creating impossible conditions for traffic and pedestrians right at the morning rush hour. These two accounts - here and here - with show you a little more of what it was like. As the second article expresses, there was a certain "solidarité météorologique"; people tried to help each other in the face of the weather dishing out its worst winter offerings.

We had an appointment that we couldn't miss, so we took a local bus shortly before 10:00 am, having slid and skated the one block between our apartment and the bus stop. The rain was pouring; we stood on glare ice while torrents of water ran down the street into the storm drains. Because of so many accidents and abandoned cars, the bus was re-routed, and let us off four long steep blocks below our destination. We finally made it, by walking in the middle of the street in-between the cars, but even there it was treacherous because you couldn't see the patches of ice beneath the water. I was completely soaked when we arrived.

But this is Montréal! You have to love it or not live here. Yesterday we stopped at one intersection as a bus slid sideways down a steep incline, and water from a burst water-main cascaded down the street. People on foot were holding onto walls, railings, each other - anything they could grasp. We looked at each other, wide-eyed, and said, "This is absolutely nuts!" - no one in their right mind would choose to live here!" And all around us, other people were slipping and sliding and falling and also laughing - what else could you do? It was crazy. I'm sorry there were injuries, but I had to admire the spirit of the people and the emergency workers too. And today? Today is sunny, bright, and beautiful.

Light

It's -10 C. here, with a determined wind. The rain turned to snow in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, and the termperature started to plummet - still, I was kind of stunned to wake up to such a cold day after the now-cruel-seeming hatless weather of the last few. As we drove downtown this morning, we saw a big yellow dog with boots on, and a few blocks later, two big happy guys in full Montreal Canadiens uniforms, wearing their skates as they crossed a main street to get to a neighborhood rink.

On the way home we stopped in Chinatown to buy a couple of Vietnamese sandwiches for lunch -  shredded grilled chicken on a crusty, sort of French-bread, long roll, with carrot and daikon radish pieces, cilantro, tiny hot green peppers (I picked them out this time, but I love them), and a special sauce that makes the whole thing super delicious. The sloping sidewalks in Chinatown were totally covered with glare ice, which was especially hard for the very elderly Chinese people who, no matter the weather, always seem to be out walking in their neighborhood. But they shuffled along, gingerly, and we made it back to our own car in one piece.

Then I settled down to write, as I have for many days in a row. I got up once in the afternoon to stretch and found that my own legs had practically frozen in place, I'd been concentrating so hard. But around 6:00 pm I finished the last sentence of the present chapter - probably the hardest one I've had to research and write - and yelled "I'm DONE!" What a relief! The chapter needs some structural work, some cutting, and some more editing for sure, but the information is there, the sentences are written, the ideas (I think!) make sense.

J. and I celebrated with a tiny bit of port, some luscious ripe pears, and some brie in front of the fireplace. I hadn't realized how much the problems of realizing this section had been weighing on my mind until I finished it -- well, "wrestled it to the ground" feels like a better description. Strange. But now I feel like I am finally on the homestretch of this project. As I told J. the other day, I've also figured out why spouses get such a big mention in the acknowledgement pages of books: because they damn well deserve it.

January Visions

We've returned to the city, driving last night under the nearly-full moon, a shooting star splitting the sky above Champlain as we crossed the border. "Maybe it's good luck," I murmured. In the small town of Saint-Anne-de-Sabrevois, we encountered flares and emergency workers in yellow reflective vests - something had shut down the center of town - and we had to make a detour on a back road. In the moonlight, we drove across the white fields, flat and uniform as paper, but here, away from the highway, even vaster, broken only by the widely-separated low shadows of a barn, a silo, a village steeple. Small clouds of fog drifted close to the ground. There had been rain, and the drainage ditches were filled with silvery water that spilled out onto the fields near the farmhouses, where rows of thin, bare poplars often formed a dubious windbreak and sense of shelter.

In the city, too, there had been rain: the park was still snowy but water stood on the ice of the lake, studded intermittently with the small evergreen trees put there as shelter and markers for the skaters. The Christmas lights still hung in loose swags from the branches of the trees, but no one was skating, and today, a wan sun sends just enough heat through the window to be felt with an outstretched hand: the January thaw continues. J. says he may get his bike out this afternoon; as for me, I am nearing the end of all possible tactics for delaying the start of my writing-day; I made oatmeal and tea, read the headlines in the Gazette, wrote a few emails including a short letter in faltering French to a new visitor from France with a beautiful blog of his own (bienvenue, Jean!). Now the day must begin in earnest: I have deadlines to meet and thousands of words yet to write and there is only one way to begin again - by beginning.

(A contribution of mine on the theme "Finding Home" has just been posted at qarrtsiluni, following a lovely poem by MB.)

Special Arrangements

We are eating roast chicken - the same bird that was suspected of harboring avian flu in my trunk the other day. It is an halal chicken, difficult to get in rural Vermont; I brought it back from the city to cook for our Muslim friends. The skin is crackly and brown with its coating of cumin and dried lemon and olive oil, and we eat it with cucumbers in yogurt, J.'s pilaf of rice, currants, parsley and vermicelli, and stir-fried carrots and zucchini.

Shirin is going back to Iran for Noruz, Iranian new year. "I am counting the days," she says, happily. Her whole extended family will meet in Tehran and travel north toward the Caspian, where they will all stay together in a house for two weeks. "It will be WONderful,"she says, her face radiant. "Have you decided yet whether to come?" she asks, turning toward her husband.

"That is a heavy dose of your family," he says, laughing. "I'm not sure I can take it. But it will depend on what's happening at work."

The main meal finishes and we bring tea and a plate of baklava. Shirin's gift tonight - she is constitutionally and culturally unable to come to a friend's house empty-handed - is a huge, heavy pomegranate, and I hand it back to her with a knife and a plate, and give several paper napkins to each of us to soak up the sticky pomegranate juice.

"Have you bought your tickets?" we ask.

"Yes," she says, as she expertly divides the pomegranate and cracks it open to reveal the dark red seeds; she is pleased and says, "Good anar!" before passing the plate around the table.

"I got a very good deal. But I was talking to the travel agent - she was a very nice woman - and I told her I needed to arrange for special meals on the airplane - it's such a long flight anyway. 'What kind of meals do you require?' she asked me. 'Islamic,' I said. So she went through the list and said, 'I'm sorry, I don't have Islamic here.'"

"So I asked her what she did have. 'Let's see', she said. 'All I have is vegetarian, diabetic, kosher, and Muslim.' So I told her Muslim would do."

Finding Home

Bookstore window on Mont-Royal

Have you all been following the latest theme unfold on qarrtsiluni? What a rich collection of contributions on the theme of Finding Home. Not only are the essays, poems, and graphics extremely well-selected and well-edited by Tom Montag and Lorianne DiSabato, the current editors, but the theme itself - which could so easily be trite or sentimental - is taking off in unpredictable directions.

Another take on "home"  - a personal journey back to Nigeria - is being written and illustrated by teju cole. It will disappear at the end of January, so the author says, so you had best savor and learn from it now.

The penultimate passenger to enter the danfo at Ojodu-Berger is a woman in an adire blouse. She holds a large book. The book’s dust-jacket is off-white, matte.

I cannot see her face. But, as she sits down, I crane my neck to see what is printed on the book cover, and I catch sight of the author’s name. What I see makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket...

And meanwhile, both Paula and qB have been offering bowls of photographic stillness and wonder that have made me gasp with gratitude.

The new blog year is starting off well.

At the Border

The corn stubble was completely covered in the flat snowfields of Quebec on Wednesday as we drove back down to Vermont. We had a trunkful of groceries, opened Christmas presents, camera gear, and clothes, and when we stopped at customs, we dutifully declared our fruits and vegetables. A friendly-looking woman in a uniform was standing in back of the usual guard in his booth; we smiled at each other. I told him we had lettuce, carrots, some fruit but no citrus, and a frozen chicken (chicken is OK, beef is not).

"What kind of fruit?" he asked.

"Apples and pears, all grown in the U.S."

"Are the apples red or green?""

I thought for a minute and said I thought I had both. He hesitated, then said, "Well, we better take a look." Damn. So we pulled our car to one of the bays at the side and waited; out came the woman with her clipboard; she introdced herself as the agriculture inspector. Well, no wonder; she was standing in back of him, and we were unlucky enough to pick that booth and that time. Usually we're just waved through. Lately there have been a lot of these higher-level visiting inspectors, and when they are there, the questioning is much more intense and bureaucratic.

This woman was very pleasant though, almost apologetic, when she saw that we were friendly and unruffled. We opened the trunk and she rummaged through the sacks of groceries, pulling out an unmarked bag of currants and cautioning me, next time, to make sure it had the country of origin on it. "Where do they produce currants?" she asked me.

"California," I said.

She pulled out some apples, and said red ones were always OK, it was the green ones that tended to be imported and hadn't been sprayed. J. started asking her questions about spraying and treatment of food. She told us that the U.S. sprays everything from Chile, for example, right at the port of entry, but Canada doesn't. "They don't grow most of those crops up there," she said, "so they don't need to protect their own industry."

Oh, we said. She pulled out two plums. "Now these I have to confiscate,"she said, "because they don't have stickers, and they could be from Chile." She held them in one hand while we talked. We mentioned that, in addition, we'd noticed that all the produce we buy in Canada seems to spoil faster, which made us suspicious that it isn't treated with fungicides and preservatives. By then she was feeling comfortable with us, and she said, "Oh, yeah, we spray and treat all our produce a lot more heavily down here. Frankly, I'd much rather eat their produce than ours." I looked at J.; he raised his eyebrows - suspicions confirmed.

"You said you had a chicken? Is it in this cooler?" she asked. I zipped open the teal-colored flap and pulled out the chicken, frozen solid. "Yes, this one is fine," she said, pointing to the grocery store price tag and the label that read "poulet entier" - "whole chicken."

"It says 'poulet,' it must be a French chicken," said J., and she laughed.

"You see, we're worried about bird flu," she said. "Some people go to the Asian markets and buy chickens and ducks there..." Well, yes, I'm sure they do. But how many of those birds are imported from Asia, I wondered. Why would they do that? It's the preparation that makes them Asian. But never mind.

"Oh, and are those eggs?" she said, reaching into another bag. "We have to check those too..."That label read oeufs biologique - organic eggs. "Yes, these are OK, they're from Canada."

I glanced up at the sky. I wanted to suggest that more security might be gained by issuing passports to all the Canada geese that passed overhead, or perhaps they could send out a few F-16s from Plattsburg to strafe the resting, migrating flocks on Lake Champlain next spring... but by then we were all getting along so well, I didn't want to spoil it. Besides, she really was a nice person, she just had a job that required her to hassle people all day long, for highly limited returns - what would that do to you eventually, I wondered?

"Well, that's all, then," she said, seeming kind of reluctant to stop chatting. "Thanks a lot for your cooperation. I'll just take these plums and you can get on your way..." She looked at us, "...unless you want to eat them right now."

"Sure," J. said. "We'll eat them." We took the two plums from her outstretched hand and bit into them, and opened the car doors.

"Bye," she said, over her shoulder. "Have a nice day!"