Last summer, my "ex-husband" Johannes, who I hadn't seen in years, came over to visit, and we had an absolute blast. I know Johannes back from the days when I lived in the "convent" (me working for the magazine, him doing his civil service at the mission centre). Being friends with the civil service guys kept me sane, because they weren't so over-the-top religious and holier-than-thou like the bible students, teachers and missionaries, who would even turn their farts into hymns if they could. We did what we could to not go stir crazy in the village; our parties were legendary.
So even though we attended the obligatory bible and prayer meetings, the lads never seemed massively bible-bashing... and Johannes never seemed much the type who was very vocal about his religion. It sometimes makes me forget that he actually is religious, to the point where I was almost flabbergasted when he told me on Sunday that he hadn't been to church in ages, and I almost felt like I owed him an explanation why I hadn't. Isn't it funny how our behaviour is shaped by those who surround us? Even weirder, how much of a behavioural trap is created when different people meet, who know different sides of us, to the point where they would probably define us in different ways, and how you suddenly feel that acting in character with one person makes you act out of character with another? I have been around my current (non-religious) friends for so long that I am just not used to being my convent self anymore. It feels like putting on an old dress which is yellowed by age and a tad too small.
The reason why I haven't gone to church in years is quite simple. Church congregations make me angry. I dunno why, I think I have just developed an allergic reaction to religious communities. I have been looking around to find a church to feel home in, and none of them felt like IBC in Berlin, with Scott Hinton as our pastor, who was a legend and who was one of the very few pastors I ever knew who didn't talk out of his arse. Who could accept me for who I was, no matter what I said or did. Who I could tell that I wanted my mother dead at a time when I was terrified of her nasty plots, without having him going all sanctimonious on my ass.
Most - well, all the other churches I have been to, with rare exceptions, were places where people put on a religious facade, but essentially didn't give a crap about others, where I saw a lot of religious hubbub but felt about as welcome as in the schoolyard of my junior high. Where attending felt like nothing but going through the motions, like something I did because I felt obliged to, if not guilty about if I didn't show. And it didn't take long for me to realise what damage it actually did to my faith. In quite simple terms, if I had continued going to church, I would have lost my faith.
Years and years ago, when I spend nights crying myself to sleep because I felt that very core of mine was dying, and I was afraid to lose it, I made a pact with God. I cannot tell you how terrifying that was, when you're so indoctrinated that you believe any straying to the left or right will send you straight to hell. When in your mind this is a real possibility. But when you feel you are going to go there anyway, just a little sooner, because you've begun to crack under the pressure.
It was probably more a conversion than the night I said the sinner's prayer. Then, I handed myself over to guidance the way the church offered it, but this time, it was a complete leap of faith. That pact was about that I was going to go my own way, and have whatever notion of God existed, lead me. It would mean relying on my instincts, and my conscience, and not on the contradictory and simplistic doctrine that was spoon-fed to us and felt like the spiritual equivalent to something they would have fed you in Victorian orphanages. It would mean falling, messing up, possibly not being a religious role model, but at least always knowing that I believe what I do for the right reasons, and not because some religious community peer-pressured me into it. I'd know that the faith I'd have would be the faith I'd asked God for, and was willing to receive at that point in time, and all I'd know would be something I had learned in my heart, not just head knowledge that means nothing to me. It would perhaps be a dirtier faith in "their" terms, a more sullied, impure one, but at least it would be mine, and I wouldn't be lying to myself or act contrary to my beliefs.
And to be honest, I have never looked back. I have moved far away from the evangelical roots I have, and I have allowed myself to be open enough to learn about the divine from all sorts of sources, by recognising it for what it is, and not rejecting it just because it has a non-evangelical label attached to it.
But getting to the peace of mind was hard. It took me ages to rid myself of the sense of guilt, the feeling that I had committed an unforgivable sin by rejecting the church and its doctrines just due to their nature, because for too long it has been drummed into me that belief in church equals the belief in God - the only acceptable belief.
But when Johannes mentioned that, that twinge of guilt returned... just because of to the context in which I got to know him. And I suppose I tried to justify it again to myself.
I thought about what that particular word actually means. Gottesdienst. Directly translated, it means "god service". In which way, actually? Us serving God? Or God serving us?
I don't think God needs us to serve him. I don't think he needs us at all. I don't see him as an entity that has the need to be worshipped, to fulfil an egotistic need. Maybe God needs us in the way we need our own children, not in the sense of them ensuring our survival, but because they're the object of our love, and without them this love would be unchanneled, empty and frustrated, or not even existent... maybe loving children makes us more of what we are. We were created out of love, and perhaps our existence created a need in God. Of course you want your children to love you. But then again, would you want this love to be expressed in a doctrinal way? Would you want to force them to love you, or to show something that resembles love but is, in the end, only an act?
What is the point of us going to a service if God can be with us wherever we are? Would you summon your kids into the lounge and say, right, it's Sunday morning, show daddy some love? Isn't it more natural to love your dad in a thousand different ways? Quietly, when you walk next to him, not having to say a word, talking to him like a normal person, laughing, joking, crying? Does it have to be in Christian speak, in lame pathos that sounds fake and put on?
I don't think God has an ego in the human sense. If our ultimate goal is to be like him, and to dissolve our ego, which is a granite pillar of self-hood preventing us from melting and blending into that Ocean that is God-hood, then surely creating a barrier of falseness and pretension, of distancing worship, of rituals, of anger-creating guilt, can't be the way forward.
Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Monday, September 03, 2007
Postmodern postmodernism
So I started this discussion group on myspace called "The Postevangelicals and other reluctant believers". It's targeted at people who once used to be fundamentalists but have become disillusioned and outgrown their former evangelical views. In other words, a postevangelical, by the definition that Dave Tomlinson coined in his book, is someone who is anything but fundamentalist. You could even say that postevangelicals are religious people who have accepted the inevitability of postmodernism.
And now this guy posts a request on the discussion board, in this group, of all places: a Christian filmmaker wanting to interview fundamentalist Christians.
Ironic, if it wasn't so ironic.
*slowly bangs head against wall*
And now this guy posts a request on the discussion board, in this group, of all places: a Christian filmmaker wanting to interview fundamentalist Christians.
Ironic, if it wasn't so ironic.
*slowly bangs head against wall*
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Quote of the day
"A morality that attempts to please God without attending to its effects on the human beings that God loves may ultimately do more harm than those moral visions that claim no truck with the Almighty, but which nevertheless achieve the work of the Kingdom. In this era of global relations, God may be theologically outsourcing the pursuit of justice, truth and goodness to those without religious portfolio who are willing to do the work."
- Michael Eric Dyson
Monday, August 06, 2007
Quote of the day
This is the reason why I'm a mystic... someone who cannot find and connect to God in a sermon, a book, even the bible, through someone else's view and stories... I can only truly find him through intuition and experience. Only your own experience can be relied upon if you want God to root himself into your soul. Everything else is just theory... babble.
"Talk of spirituality is often like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps: Unless you already understand, the words are of little help, but once you understand, the words are unnecessary."
- Daniel A. Helminak
1 Corinthians 13:12 (New Living Translation)
"Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely."
Monday, April 09, 2007
Open the floodgates for wisdom
My friend Marcus is not just a poetic genius, but also one of the most enlightened people I know. People like Marcus remind you that your life has purpose, and gives you a flood of hope for the fuckin species we are. Here is some mindblowing and beautiful poetry he wrote.
Marcus gets my YOU FUCKIN ROCK badge of honour.
It is for the sake of those without hope
That hope is given to us
There is no new messiah
It's a big fraud
To leave us waiting
For the ultimate parental figure
We lay here waiting
For direction
In the hope He will tell us what to do
There is no messiah
He's not coming
It's down to you
We have all we need
There is enough
The Muslims say Muhammad was the last prophet
I concur
Now it is us
We are all prophets
So whilst we lay in wait
Our egos take control
In the century of the self
You are the next messiah
All of you
Seek and ye find
Seek what is for the good of us all
- Common unity
Each one of us is here on a mission
To find our life role
Our true meaning
Our true goal
So find it – do your research
How will you better our soul?
I say again:
There is no new messiah
It's a story
We lay in waiting
Waiting for the father
We lay here waiting
We want direction
We hope for direction
There is no new messiah
He is not coming
It's down to you
We have all we need
There is enough
The last prophet ahs come and gone
Let us unite and refine
let us unite and define
let us unite in time
We lay in waiting
Our egos take control
The century of the self
You are the messiah
All of us
Seek and ye find
Identify wholesome actions
For the good of us all
Dismiss unwholesome actions
For the good of us all
Find common unity
Celebrate life
Find common unity
Find your mission
Find your life
Find your meaning
Find your path
Celebrate life
Reflect
Find the goal
Common unity
End to war
End to control
End to death and destruction
End to greed
End to infliction
End to ignorance
End to selfishness
Find your piece to the jigsaw
For us all
Monday, October 16, 2006
On the pursuit of happiness
I’m reading a book by the Dalai Lama at the moment, and it opened my eyes to a few things that I had known for a long time, but either denied or forgotten for that time being:
The purpose of life is to achieve happiness.
Oh, I hear the evangelicals howl in outrage.
But what is happiness – true happiness – other than heaven, other than the soul perfectly tuned, perfectly in peace with itself and its source of life, reaping the maximum benefits from this relationship? All the bible asks... all any religion teaches... are ways to achieve that. There is nothing selfish about it. Happiness is the soul’s ideal state, the soul’s archaic, original state, which is why anything in life, any motivation, is aimed to reach this state, in healthy or unhealthy ways, or to simply avoid its opposite, di-stress. A happy soul will automatically strive to be virtuous and to create happiness around itself. A happy soul is a saint’s soul.
True, suffering may build character, but what else does suffering do but remind you of what you really want, of emphasising the lack of which you crave? They say suffering makes you stronger, but I don’t necessarily agree. Suffering breaks you, bit by bit, cripples your vision of goodness, and makes you fearful. And it is no secret what happens to many hurt and scared people. A precious few learn. But most of them lash out and pass on the suffering that was inflicted on them. No healthy, stable individual goes to commit a crime. Or violence.
The worry is that the goal to achieve happiness becomes one of unscrupulous hedonism and selfishness. But things like that don’t bring happiness. There is nothing wrong with a healthy level of pleasure-seeking, but as soon as it becomes addiction, it will lead to suffering. Happiness and goodness go hand in hand.
The sentence we are to find solace in in the midst of suffering – “It can only get better, there is no way it could get worse” – is a lie. It can always get worse. One doesn’t even have to point to Job to know that. That sentence is a cop-out.
Suffering doesn’t create good people. It creates, for the most, bad people. Crime. A permanent sense of loss and deprivation and fear that creates greed. Envy. Bitterness. Look at me. When I’m depressed, I’m a shit person and a shit friend. I become bitter, angry, destructive, whiny, clingy.
Is the pursuit of happiness mere hedonism? Buddhism differentiated between happiness and pleasure. True happiness does not create bad consequences. Happier people are more willing to help others, are much more open to connect, less willing to inflict harm. They can only give what they got. How can that be a bad thing?
The purpose of life is to achieve happiness.
Oh, I hear the evangelicals howl in outrage.
But what is happiness – true happiness – other than heaven, other than the soul perfectly tuned, perfectly in peace with itself and its source of life, reaping the maximum benefits from this relationship? All the bible asks... all any religion teaches... are ways to achieve that. There is nothing selfish about it. Happiness is the soul’s ideal state, the soul’s archaic, original state, which is why anything in life, any motivation, is aimed to reach this state, in healthy or unhealthy ways, or to simply avoid its opposite, di-stress. A happy soul will automatically strive to be virtuous and to create happiness around itself. A happy soul is a saint’s soul.
True, suffering may build character, but what else does suffering do but remind you of what you really want, of emphasising the lack of which you crave? They say suffering makes you stronger, but I don’t necessarily agree. Suffering breaks you, bit by bit, cripples your vision of goodness, and makes you fearful. And it is no secret what happens to many hurt and scared people. A precious few learn. But most of them lash out and pass on the suffering that was inflicted on them. No healthy, stable individual goes to commit a crime. Or violence.
The worry is that the goal to achieve happiness becomes one of unscrupulous hedonism and selfishness. But things like that don’t bring happiness. There is nothing wrong with a healthy level of pleasure-seeking, but as soon as it becomes addiction, it will lead to suffering. Happiness and goodness go hand in hand.
The sentence we are to find solace in in the midst of suffering – “It can only get better, there is no way it could get worse” – is a lie. It can always get worse. One doesn’t even have to point to Job to know that. That sentence is a cop-out.
Suffering doesn’t create good people. It creates, for the most, bad people. Crime. A permanent sense of loss and deprivation and fear that creates greed. Envy. Bitterness. Look at me. When I’m depressed, I’m a shit person and a shit friend. I become bitter, angry, destructive, whiny, clingy.
Is the pursuit of happiness mere hedonism? Buddhism differentiated between happiness and pleasure. True happiness does not create bad consequences. Happier people are more willing to help others, are much more open to connect, less willing to inflict harm. They can only give what they got. How can that be a bad thing?
Monday, September 11, 2006
The problem of evil
I have always wondered how to cure evil. I know, that sounds stupid, like I've got some Messiah complex. But the thing is, I just see it like, how can I expect for things to get better if I just sit and wait? Maybe it's part of my "religious" belief... I believe in the concept of evil, even though I also believe in postmodernism. I believe there are things people can do wrong. And I believe that evil is the tendency to damage, harm and distort.
The Christian view, in simple terms is, to turn the other cheek, and I understand that to a certain extent, because if one side doesn't put a stop to violence, you get disasters like the middle east. But it isn't that easy, and I think it must be a misunderstood concept, as well, because it would imply to accept any form of abuse without ever standing up for yourself.
How far do you go? How long do you wait? How often do you try it the nice way?
That's a thing that has tortured me immensely... when I fell out with The Evil Bitch that gave birth to me. Obviously, the only way to find peace was to cut her off. Some things are beyond healing.
It's also really hard for me to be around mean and rude people. Rude not in the sense of swearing, but in the sense of being unkind just for the sake of it. Fair enough, I am somewhat on the sensitive side, and I can accept that people sometimes have a bad day, but I have met people who seem to take pleasure in hurting others, and I simply can't get my head around that. I just don't get it.
I have tried to be nice to them. To overlook the fact that they are hurtful. Foolishly, I thought that maybe being nice would be a way to break that. It may work in novels and movies. But in real life? Forget about it. It's hard to be compassionate with someone who hurts you permanently.
It boggled my mind. Why the fuck are people still evil when you have done everything to show them that you mean well?
I found the answer the other day.
It's a simple quote from a guy called Scott Peck (I wonder, is that the same guy who wrote "The Road Less Travelled"?), and it goes like this.
"Regardless of how well they attempt to appear calm and collected in their daily dealings, the evil live their lives in fear. It is a terror – and a suffering – so chronic, so interwoven into the fabric of their being, that they may not even feel it as such.”
That's when I realised that there is no cure for evil. The only thing you can do is keep your own life sorted. I dunno if it is wrong to shut out evil people, for the sake of trying to avoid being hurt and become a monster yourself. I just can't do it. I don't feel equipped for it. And I dunno if I should be.
Scheiß-Postmodernism.
The Christian view, in simple terms is, to turn the other cheek, and I understand that to a certain extent, because if one side doesn't put a stop to violence, you get disasters like the middle east. But it isn't that easy, and I think it must be a misunderstood concept, as well, because it would imply to accept any form of abuse without ever standing up for yourself.
How far do you go? How long do you wait? How often do you try it the nice way?
That's a thing that has tortured me immensely... when I fell out with The Evil Bitch that gave birth to me. Obviously, the only way to find peace was to cut her off. Some things are beyond healing.
It's also really hard for me to be around mean and rude people. Rude not in the sense of swearing, but in the sense of being unkind just for the sake of it. Fair enough, I am somewhat on the sensitive side, and I can accept that people sometimes have a bad day, but I have met people who seem to take pleasure in hurting others, and I simply can't get my head around that. I just don't get it.
I have tried to be nice to them. To overlook the fact that they are hurtful. Foolishly, I thought that maybe being nice would be a way to break that. It may work in novels and movies. But in real life? Forget about it. It's hard to be compassionate with someone who hurts you permanently.
It boggled my mind. Why the fuck are people still evil when you have done everything to show them that you mean well?
I found the answer the other day.
It's a simple quote from a guy called Scott Peck (I wonder, is that the same guy who wrote "The Road Less Travelled"?), and it goes like this.
"Regardless of how well they attempt to appear calm and collected in their daily dealings, the evil live their lives in fear. It is a terror – and a suffering – so chronic, so interwoven into the fabric of their being, that they may not even feel it as such.”
That's when I realised that there is no cure for evil. The only thing you can do is keep your own life sorted. I dunno if it is wrong to shut out evil people, for the sake of trying to avoid being hurt and become a monster yourself. I just can't do it. I don't feel equipped for it. And I dunno if I should be.
Scheiß-Postmodernism.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Time
“We don’t waste time. We keep it, whether we drive directly East or just a bit North first. Did you forget everything? Up here it is not important how quickly you get there. If you take a detour, your life is still happening. No time is lost... Maybe that was the biggest problem the Quallunaaq brought us – time. We had to learn that there is something like wasted time. The Quallunaaq believe that waiting means wasting time and therefore wasting life.”
– Akesuk in “The Swarm” by Frank Schätzing
Maybe Western concepts are not what they are cracked up to be. I see time as my biggest enemy, when it actually isn’t.
Needless to say, this is the desperate talk of a nearly 30-year-old.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Of friends’ houses, rain and Hesse
This last week has been really nice. I have seen more of my friends who were, up until now, crazy busy with exams and projects. Pat’s moved into a house down the road, adding another friendly soul to my wicked street. I went for a few drinks with Iain, who’s got the most brilliant mind and is amazing to talk to because he is so genuine and pensive. And I went to Jamie’s place quite a few times and hung out with him and Geoff and Jim... gawd, I love those three guys: they are creative geniuses, so friendly and laid back, funny as fuck and spontaneous. There is something about their house, their community and company that equally boggles my mind, my perception, makes me happy and makes me creative. They are three of those kinda people you can’t help but like, they are equally eccentric and lovable.
Saturday night I totally beat Jamie and Jim in Scrabble, god bless “bairns”. And on Wednesday night we watched this awfully dark German film called “Funny Games” which helped us establish a ground rule about drinking/smoking weed: If you are drunk/stoned, everyone else will seem drunk and stoned to you. And we drank quite a lot, so that made that film a proper mindfuck – fun nonetheless. I’ve almost become a lodger there, crashing in a spare room each time because it was too late to get back home.
So it happened that I was there on Sunday morning. I must have woken up quite early, but I had no sense of time. It was perfectly quiet, and the rain washed down the windows in waves and creeks, with a monotonous drum that was both creating a feeling of cosiness and making me drowsy.
There is something incredibly calming and peaceful, a moment of perfect happiness, when sitting on an early Sunday morning, watching the thick mournful wafts of rain clouds drift across a wet sky while drinking the warm, cosy comfort of a hot cup of tea and soaking up the moment. It was a moment where I felt perfectly at home – contemplate this feeling, when does one ever feel like the way one felt as a child, when does one ever feel that one belongs somewhere, and if not in this particular place, then at least in this particular moment, where everything just fits and is as it should be. I live for moments like that. More so, this is what keeps me alive. I have rarely felt that way, felt it so intense, so there, in the past years... hell, thinking about it, my whole life.
Moments like that I had only at Peter’s in Berlin, my mentor and surrogate family when everything else was going to the pits. It’s moments like that I seek, everywhere, so everywhere will be my home, so I don’t have to feel scared, lost. If it is even to sit at a train station’s platform on a sunny spot and connecting to the concrete below me and find the slightest ounce of beauty in it, so it would feel welcoming, so I could even embrace being in a place that is absolutely hideous. Or trying to connect to the drunks in the Oscar Wilde, having a laugh with that guy who would always ramble mindfuck in a Shakespearan English, stuff so crazy I would never be able to remember it. Being able to embrace the milieu you dread will make you feel fearless. Having a strong dream of getting away was what made me feel home most of the time, the hope I would not be wherever I was one day. And at the same time embracing and loving what I feared most, so I wouldn’t have to fear it.
And then I thought, England was one of the places where I wanted to be, because something there, for some reason, felt home to me, and at that moment I experienced it the strongest – the realisation that now I was actually here, where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be, how I wanted to be. Just with a warm cup of tea, watching rain clouds in a zen-like moment, feeling home, feeling nothing but affection at the thought of my friends still asleep in their beds or out and about somewhere, who made this place home for me, unwittingly or not.
Sadly, I am too impatient, too annoyed by idleness, to sit and watch clouds forever. So I picked up that book Jamie was reading, just planning to browse a little through it to kill time, and then, soon, get a taxi home.
But then the rain got torrential, and while I use that as an excuse for my prolonged stay, it wasn’t why I was still there hours later. I was hooked.
Working in a bookshop has the advantage of having permanent access to books, and perhaps even as a requirement, know them. At least a little. And I have read truckloads of books in the past months, or at least leafed through them, and some of them are better than others, but none of them got me hooked. Most of them – easily about 90% of the fiction section – is mass-produced, flat drivel with two-dimensional forgettable character in exchangeable, unoriginal situations. In fact, most books seem to come from the same blue print. Read one book of chick lit, you have read them all. Read the Da Vinci Code, which is godawful writing, if you ask me, and you have basically read all the books coming in its wake. The Lucifer Code. The Magdalene Legacy. The Traveller. It is abominable. Most of these books lack the literary cousin of nutritional value, they are like flat, tasteless rice cakes next to a Thanksgiving Dinner; you close the book and forget it immediately; nothing in it struck a chord, sang in tune with you, changed you, awoke you. Maybe that is what makes a good book: if it manages to touch something in you that awakens you to yourself. If it manages to speak out something that has always been in there in you, somewhere, as an unshaped thought, too vague to recognise and hence benefit and grow from it. It is only a precious few books that manage to find the seed of YOU in you and plant it.
And I had just found one. I wasn’t reading it, I was absorbing it, soaking it up like a sponge. Why have I never read Hesse before?? I always planned on it, but never did. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it, maybe I didn’t see the messiah when he stared into my face. He is one of the few that know my mind better than myself and helps me excavate it, wake me up to myself: Irving, C.S. Lewis, Douglas Coupland, Richard Bach. Finding someone who does that is like finding love, finding a soul mate, hell, finding your soul. Minds like these assure me in my knowledge that there is something like a universal idea, collective mind, an ultimate reality that everyone shares in, because they manage to grasp the essence of it and what it does to your soul. The thing Jung made a science of, Tillich turned into a theology. How you wake up to life like you have always meant to be like this.
The book I am talking of is “Narcissus and Goldmund”. It’s the story of a serene and wise monk novice and his pupil. They are friends, but they are as different as can be. Goldmund loves Narcissus so much he wants to be like him, wants his approval at all cost, but Narcissus rejects this and wants him to be true to his own self instead. It’s both painful and beautiful to read, the struggles they go through. I guess the final moral of the tale is that the most divine path to follow is your genuinely own, and that this path is what will lead you to your real self and God in the end. Goldmund’s path leads out of the monastery and into a life of debauchery and even murder, but in all this he is never a bad person because he just takes what life gives him and makes of it what he can. What makes it even more fascinating is that he is somewhat of a Kaspar Hauser: his isolated upbringing in the monastery makes him perfectly estranged to the social rules of the outside world: all he has is his instinct and the wisdom Narcissus gave him. It plays with the idea of whether and how much morality, or even just social appropriateness is something innate or something conditioned.
I have a strong belief that if we stem from God and our true nature is in God, then finding our own true path is the only way to him... and it will never be a straight one. That we sin on the way is inevitable... it does not mean we’re encouraged to sin (whatever idea you may have of what sin is), but that we need to accept that sin, flaws, mistakes, error, is just part of our nature and that what we make of it is what matters. For instance, Goldmund learns by instinct and trial and error what the difference between love and sex is... no doctrine could teach him that. The New Covenant is the only way because doctrine, trained lessons, are not what brings life and how to lead it home to us... the human way is by trial and error, and the New Covenant is the thing that reconciles us to God. I guess everyone has a different interpretation of it, and some people still think it is about rigid doctrine, but I could never reconcile myself to that. It’s just not genuine... it doesn’t work. And it’s not that I haven’t tried. All I know is that what I learned about God I didn’t learn in church, or in bible classes, or Sunday school.
The way I learned about him (or her, or it) was through life and through instinct, and through common sense, and those also taught me that God is much bigger than whatever was taught in church... he is much more universal, in fact, so universal that you see him and aspects of him in all religions... even though all of them fall short in capturing exactly what he is about.
I guess, “Narcissus and Goldmund” is a book that somehow expresses that ingraspable (is that a word?) yet stark universality and omnipresence without turning it into a religious book... it’s closest to how I experience God, or my own spirituality.
Funny enough, Hesse is closely associated with Nietzsche, who once claimed that God is dead.
Funnier even, is that Hesse was also good mates with Jung, who is famous for uniting spirituality/religion and psychology. And funniest is that this Nietzsche quote is one of the most misinterpreted ones in the world... it is one that merely states the contemporary human condition of being unable to accept God in traditional terms. Funny that one of the biggest enemies of the church should help me find the real thing.
And that I should only learn from friends what the word family means.
Saturday night I totally beat Jamie and Jim in Scrabble, god bless “bairns”. And on Wednesday night we watched this awfully dark German film called “Funny Games” which helped us establish a ground rule about drinking/smoking weed: If you are drunk/stoned, everyone else will seem drunk and stoned to you. And we drank quite a lot, so that made that film a proper mindfuck – fun nonetheless. I’ve almost become a lodger there, crashing in a spare room each time because it was too late to get back home.
So it happened that I was there on Sunday morning. I must have woken up quite early, but I had no sense of time. It was perfectly quiet, and the rain washed down the windows in waves and creeks, with a monotonous drum that was both creating a feeling of cosiness and making me drowsy.
There is something incredibly calming and peaceful, a moment of perfect happiness, when sitting on an early Sunday morning, watching the thick mournful wafts of rain clouds drift across a wet sky while drinking the warm, cosy comfort of a hot cup of tea and soaking up the moment. It was a moment where I felt perfectly at home – contemplate this feeling, when does one ever feel like the way one felt as a child, when does one ever feel that one belongs somewhere, and if not in this particular place, then at least in this particular moment, where everything just fits and is as it should be. I live for moments like that. More so, this is what keeps me alive. I have rarely felt that way, felt it so intense, so there, in the past years... hell, thinking about it, my whole life.
Moments like that I had only at Peter’s in Berlin, my mentor and surrogate family when everything else was going to the pits. It’s moments like that I seek, everywhere, so everywhere will be my home, so I don’t have to feel scared, lost. If it is even to sit at a train station’s platform on a sunny spot and connecting to the concrete below me and find the slightest ounce of beauty in it, so it would feel welcoming, so I could even embrace being in a place that is absolutely hideous. Or trying to connect to the drunks in the Oscar Wilde, having a laugh with that guy who would always ramble mindfuck in a Shakespearan English, stuff so crazy I would never be able to remember it. Being able to embrace the milieu you dread will make you feel fearless. Having a strong dream of getting away was what made me feel home most of the time, the hope I would not be wherever I was one day. And at the same time embracing and loving what I feared most, so I wouldn’t have to fear it.
And then I thought, England was one of the places where I wanted to be, because something there, for some reason, felt home to me, and at that moment I experienced it the strongest – the realisation that now I was actually here, where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be, how I wanted to be. Just with a warm cup of tea, watching rain clouds in a zen-like moment, feeling home, feeling nothing but affection at the thought of my friends still asleep in their beds or out and about somewhere, who made this place home for me, unwittingly or not.
Sadly, I am too impatient, too annoyed by idleness, to sit and watch clouds forever. So I picked up that book Jamie was reading, just planning to browse a little through it to kill time, and then, soon, get a taxi home.
But then the rain got torrential, and while I use that as an excuse for my prolonged stay, it wasn’t why I was still there hours later. I was hooked.
Working in a bookshop has the advantage of having permanent access to books, and perhaps even as a requirement, know them. At least a little. And I have read truckloads of books in the past months, or at least leafed through them, and some of them are better than others, but none of them got me hooked. Most of them – easily about 90% of the fiction section – is mass-produced, flat drivel with two-dimensional forgettable character in exchangeable, unoriginal situations. In fact, most books seem to come from the same blue print. Read one book of chick lit, you have read them all. Read the Da Vinci Code, which is godawful writing, if you ask me, and you have basically read all the books coming in its wake. The Lucifer Code. The Magdalene Legacy. The Traveller. It is abominable. Most of these books lack the literary cousin of nutritional value, they are like flat, tasteless rice cakes next to a Thanksgiving Dinner; you close the book and forget it immediately; nothing in it struck a chord, sang in tune with you, changed you, awoke you. Maybe that is what makes a good book: if it manages to touch something in you that awakens you to yourself. If it manages to speak out something that has always been in there in you, somewhere, as an unshaped thought, too vague to recognise and hence benefit and grow from it. It is only a precious few books that manage to find the seed of YOU in you and plant it.
And I had just found one. I wasn’t reading it, I was absorbing it, soaking it up like a sponge. Why have I never read Hesse before?? I always planned on it, but never did. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it, maybe I didn’t see the messiah when he stared into my face. He is one of the few that know my mind better than myself and helps me excavate it, wake me up to myself: Irving, C.S. Lewis, Douglas Coupland, Richard Bach. Finding someone who does that is like finding love, finding a soul mate, hell, finding your soul. Minds like these assure me in my knowledge that there is something like a universal idea, collective mind, an ultimate reality that everyone shares in, because they manage to grasp the essence of it and what it does to your soul. The thing Jung made a science of, Tillich turned into a theology. How you wake up to life like you have always meant to be like this.
The book I am talking of is “Narcissus and Goldmund”. It’s the story of a serene and wise monk novice and his pupil. They are friends, but they are as different as can be. Goldmund loves Narcissus so much he wants to be like him, wants his approval at all cost, but Narcissus rejects this and wants him to be true to his own self instead. It’s both painful and beautiful to read, the struggles they go through. I guess the final moral of the tale is that the most divine path to follow is your genuinely own, and that this path is what will lead you to your real self and God in the end. Goldmund’s path leads out of the monastery and into a life of debauchery and even murder, but in all this he is never a bad person because he just takes what life gives him and makes of it what he can. What makes it even more fascinating is that he is somewhat of a Kaspar Hauser: his isolated upbringing in the monastery makes him perfectly estranged to the social rules of the outside world: all he has is his instinct and the wisdom Narcissus gave him. It plays with the idea of whether and how much morality, or even just social appropriateness is something innate or something conditioned.
I have a strong belief that if we stem from God and our true nature is in God, then finding our own true path is the only way to him... and it will never be a straight one. That we sin on the way is inevitable... it does not mean we’re encouraged to sin (whatever idea you may have of what sin is), but that we need to accept that sin, flaws, mistakes, error, is just part of our nature and that what we make of it is what matters. For instance, Goldmund learns by instinct and trial and error what the difference between love and sex is... no doctrine could teach him that. The New Covenant is the only way because doctrine, trained lessons, are not what brings life and how to lead it home to us... the human way is by trial and error, and the New Covenant is the thing that reconciles us to God. I guess everyone has a different interpretation of it, and some people still think it is about rigid doctrine, but I could never reconcile myself to that. It’s just not genuine... it doesn’t work. And it’s not that I haven’t tried. All I know is that what I learned about God I didn’t learn in church, or in bible classes, or Sunday school.
The way I learned about him (or her, or it) was through life and through instinct, and through common sense, and those also taught me that God is much bigger than whatever was taught in church... he is much more universal, in fact, so universal that you see him and aspects of him in all religions... even though all of them fall short in capturing exactly what he is about.
I guess, “Narcissus and Goldmund” is a book that somehow expresses that ingraspable (is that a word?) yet stark universality and omnipresence without turning it into a religious book... it’s closest to how I experience God, or my own spirituality.
Funny enough, Hesse is closely associated with Nietzsche, who once claimed that God is dead.
Funnier even, is that Hesse was also good mates with Jung, who is famous for uniting spirituality/religion and psychology. And funniest is that this Nietzsche quote is one of the most misinterpreted ones in the world... it is one that merely states the contemporary human condition of being unable to accept God in traditional terms. Funny that one of the biggest enemies of the church should help me find the real thing.
And that I should only learn from friends what the word family means.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Quote of the Day
“You know what’s the problem of our time, Leon? People lose their meaning.
Everyone is replacable. There are no more ideals, and without ideals there is
nothing that makes us greater than we are. Everyone desperately looks for proof
that the world with him is a little different than without him. – I have done
something for this boy. Maybe it had meaning. Maybe it gave me a little
meaning.”-- Greywolf in The Swarm, by Frank Schätzing
Monday, October 17, 2005
The taste of hierophany
"What's clarity like?
Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math
problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a
heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is
twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite
sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this
sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though
day-to-day twentieth century living had become an almost unsolvable algebraic equation. This is why Richard drank. This is why my old friends used to spend
their lives getting blitzed on everything from cough syrup to crystal meth.
Anything to make that sloggy buzz make a retreat."
- Jared in Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland.
Once more, Coupland has sent my mind reeling. He sets something off in me that equally feeds me and makes me want to scream in frustration, because I feel on the verge of seeing the mystery of life with that clarity, but the buzz in my mind is too loud. This is the reason why I wrote my dissertation on him. This is exactly how I feel. This is why I am into mysticism rather than pure theology-by-the-book. This is what I think is behind the bible verse of 1 Corinthians 13:12: "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."
This clarity is what I have so rarely, for just a few seconds, but it makes me realise that the search is not in vain.
This is what happens sometimes when I drink. This is why I drink before exams. This is why one of my friends said he does drugs - to enable him to understand things he otherwise couldn't. It clears my mind by killing the buzz, by straightening out the thoughts that are wildly tangled in my head, into coherence.
Sometimes I feel that all the answers to life are in my head already, but they are a tangled-up mess I cannot make sense of to save my life, that I cannot get undone. I only see scraps and pieces that reveal merely that they are part of something greater, but I am missing too many pieces to see or even guess the whole thing, and even if I had them all, I would spend a lifetime - hell, a billion lifetimes - putting them together, into the one big epiphany that only God has the mental capacity for. It drives me nuts, I feel I can figure it out if I just think hard enough, think long enough, until it makes my head hurt.
It will be so multi-layered, so complex and yet so simple, a knowledge that is in all of us already, but that we have lost growing up. It will be so simple that we will slap our foreheads and go "of course!" (or "DUH!" in valley girl talk).
Yet - no simple answers, when in writing, suffice. The truth is not theory, and cannot be reduced to an axiom on paper. The truth can only come via life, alive. Simple textbook answers only frustrate. The answers are simple when they reveal themselves to you, but mindblowingly complex when you try to write them down.
It would be like trying to write EVERYTHING. Everything there is. In a way that makes it all fit together.
Coupland strikes that chord with me, he makes me feel like what I feel is real, is an almost collective experience of sensing the truth, faint but real, like a far distant, barely audible hum.
He may not give me answers. But he keeps making me look. He is a priest of and to my kind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)