I-YOUniverse

Part 1

It’s been awhile since I spent serious time with Shakespeare, which I find cleansing, rigorous—aerobic exercise for mind and spirit. So I recently tackled Antony and Cleopatra, reading and re-reading.

Then I hear the newsbyte that John Edwards has had an affair. Damn! He was talking about the poor, like no other presidential candidate.

Is this getting old, or what? Maybe if we can find a public official who hasn’t had an affair, he or she should get the headline.

Having read John 8, I’m not one to throw stones. But I’d like to understand what’s going on here. That’s why we read classics like Shakespeare, isn’t it, to understand the human condition?

So we begin. Married to Fulvia, later to Octavia, Mark Antony is having the time of his life—with Cleopatra. He says to her:

There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now. 1.1.46-47

Sounds like a guy planning his retirement, doesn’t he?

At the same time, he recognizes that the affair is doing damage:

I must from this enchanting queen break off:
Ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know,
My idleness doth hatch. 1.2.127-129

Of course, he doesn’t do it.

During the decisive battle at Actium, Cleopatra flees and, abandoning his forces, Antony follows her. His soldier Scarus says:

We’ve kiss’d away / Kingdoms 3.10.7-8

I never saw an action of such shame;
Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before
Did violate so itself. 3.10.22-24

Antony confesses,

…  I / Have lost my way forever. 3.11.3-4

He dismisses his soldiers, rejecting their arguments that they should stay with him. Realizing he has reduced himself to a thing, he says:

 Let that be left / Which leaves itself. 3.11.19-20 

He confronts Cleopatra with her total control over him:

 O’er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me. 3.11.59-61 

Just as a cloud “that’s dragonish, / a vapour sometime like a bear or lion,” vanishes before his eyes, he is disappearing:

Even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. 4.14.11-13

Next, he calls on his servant Eros to kill him. Instead, Eros himself suicides. Antony fumbles, wounding himself but remaining alive for yet one more love scene with Cleopatra. Rather than being taken to Rome as a prisoner, Cleopatra has servants bring in vipers to bite her to death.

Shakespeare paints a fascinating, indepth portrait of persons who are poisonous for each other.

In Part 2, I’ll share my own reflections.

1008 pages!

I finished my semi-annual reading of Lord of the Rings.

Not the 130 pages of appendices. Not The Silmarillion. That book’s a little dense for me, or I’m too dense for it, maybe. I’ve read that Tolkien believed that names are the oldest element of language, slowest to change over time. So he packs in names, three to five for each person, place or thing.

But LOTR is one of those books that’s become part of me. I read one of Tom Shippey’s books on the background and buried meanings, which helped me untangle and identify many Christian elements. Since this was a time before Christ, they had to be hidden. But they are there.

For example, the dates, which Tolkien tracked meticulously. The Company sets out from Rivendell on December 25. Another famous Christian element is that elvin waybread lembas is parallel to the bread of the Eucharist.

Tolkien, along with Lewis, Joseph Campbell, and George Lucas, lead the way in recovering myth for our culture.

Myth is language about truth which can’t be put into words.

Oh, I know myth means made-up fable or legend; we think especially of Greek and Roman religious myths. Paul warns against them. I’m talking about language that transcends language, that breaks language like a chick breaks its shell.

Tolkien tells a wonderful parable. I’m not sure where: “Of Faerie Stories,” in Tree and Leaf or “the Monster and the Critics,” his ground-breaking essay on Beowulf which every biblical interpreter or critic would benefit from reading. Here’s the gist of the story:

Old Stones

An old farmer had a field. Some people bought it, and found some wonderful old stones on it. They were carved, some with images, others with letters or ancient runes.

The people became fascinated with the stones. They began to publish papers on the origins of the stones, and the meanings of the markings on them. A great debate rose up among archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists, and all the ologists there are about the meaning of the stones.

But they all forgot the most important thing.

The old farmer used the stones to build a tower. And he used to climb its steps and look out at the Sea.

A Look at the Stars

Near the climax of LOTR, as the Captains of the West, hopelessly outnumbered, press the attack on Mordor to distract the enemy’s Eye from Frodo’s approaching the Crack of Doom, Aragorn stands on the hill, surveying the debacle,

his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens

(LOTR, 1994, p. 927).

Here the external truth and beauty is internalized in the person of the king, and by them he reigns even before victory is won.

The book is about Aragorn growing into kingship. He moves from Strider, the ranger, to king, nowhere more regal than this moment.

Another star moment comes when Sam and Frodo are walking through Ithilien, toward the lair of Shelob, the monster spider. Sam looks up.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for awhile. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For, like a shaft clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

 (p. 901)

This passage gives me hope, like almost no other in the book. The Shadows of terrorism, and worse U.S. politics and militarism, are small passing things.

Vertical Meets Horizontal

If horizontal is the human plane, and vertical the God plane, then myth is the moment, like an in-breaking beam of light forming a cross, where God-human transcendent-immanent intersect.

Favorite Character

Faramir, Boromir’s brother, is my favorite character. I like his association with Ithilien, one of the most beautiful landscapes Tolkien creates. I love his courage, his willingness to butt heads with his tyrannical father. He fights but is not a soldier.

The extended version of the film attributes to Faramir a passage the book gives to Sam, when he comes near a dead enemy.

He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart; or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from home; and if he would not really rather stayed there in peace.

 (p. 646)

Of course, Sam with his loyalty, simplicity and goodness is a role model for us all.

 I wish Tolkien’s faith had been more explicit, I guess. I have mixed feelings. Think of his influence on world culture. How many Christians have had the same?

When the heart is hard and parched, come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides, shutting me out from beyond, come to me, God of silence, with Your peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my God.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O Holy One, come with Your light and Your thunder.

The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Herbert Vetter (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 1997).

First Asian to win Nobel Prize for literature (1913), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is a national poet of India, an educator, lyricist, advocate of Indian liberation from British rule.

I’m making good progress in LOTR. The orcs have Frodo in custody, Aragorn and the Dunedain have taken the paths of the dead, and the Rohirrim are about to ride. Sam reveals that Frodo bears the Ring to Faramir, Boromir’s younger brother and son of the Steward of Gondor, and (in the book) Faramir has no desire to take it for himself or his father, not if he found it lying on the road.

Inconsistent, as Tolkien’s critics charged? Not to me. Faramir is a pure soul; nothing in him is snared by false promises of power and domination. Temptation arises because something within answers the external call. “One is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it” James 1:14 (NRSV).

Scapegoating

We keep tripping over the dynamic of projection, blaming others for our sins. It’s a strategy as old as Adam and as contemporary as 2008 presidential politics. It’s Eve’s fault Adam ate the apple. It’s illegal aliens who are wrecking the U.S. economy. I’ve never met a little green Martian; as far as I know there are no laws against them.

Hooray for California

Oh, speaking of projection. Imagine:

Two young MTV-watching kids go to their preacher. “We want to get married, be true to each other, forsaking all others, till death do us part,” they say.

“No way,” says the preacher.

“How come?” they ask.

“Everybody knows, gays aren’t monogamous,” the preacher replies, “and this isn’t California.”

I promise on a stack of Bibles to read

Speaking of temptation. My reading queue is getting quite long. I’m including it also as a text widget as a kind of self-discipline. Currently it includes:

• Anglo-Saxon Spirituality
• Julian of Norwich (in the Classics of Western Spirituality series)
• Selected Poems of Tagore
• Prayers of Tagore, ed. Vetter
• WordPress for Dummies
• Not yet delivered: Ordeal of Love: C. F. Andrews and India, Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods

Reading is what I do, mostly. Without it, this chair I spend my days in would be a prison. And I have few temptations stronger than amazon.com in my repertoire.

What are they?

Never mind.

I’m doing my annual read of Lord of the Rings, a myth of war.

Soldiers of Peace?

As much as I love Tolkien, I realize

(1) he wrote when his city was being bombed by the Germans and his son was in the military.
(2) He was a veteran of World War I.
(3) He wrote from the Germanic tradition that glorifies the war hero, depicting Jesus as a hero who leaped onto the cross as to a battle.

For example, take these lines from Dream of the Rood, one of the oldest poems in English:

The young hero stripped himself–he, God Almighty–
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.

(ll. 39-41)

A Tradition Explolited

More than to Boromir, the elder brother, I’m drawn to Faramir, the younger brother, who longed for peace. He said:

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.

LOTR, 1994, p. 656

In the past the desperate straits of war often called forth human response at its best. Civilians worked long hours, sacrificed for the common good. Soldiers gave their lives to defend home and loved ones, and ideals such as freedom. Today it’s still true some individuals offer their very best in time of war.

Politicians and corporations exploit this tradition of honor and valor.

Mass Destruction in a Bottle

Today is different. The capacity to destroy the earth lies within reach of small groups as well as nations. All the progress of science will be weighed against the development of weapons of mass destruction including weaponized gases and viruses, which can be transported in small bottles. The good accomplished by warfare will be obliterated along with everything else by its indiscriminate violence.

History will judge as a grave error the decision to treat the attack on the World Trade Center as an act of war rather than as a crime. Once we responded with violence, with our own WMD, we became the aggressors, the destroyers; the terrorists became defenders of their homes, their culture, their religion.

A Corporate Shell Game?

The war on Iraq is more about economics, oil, than ideals. It’s about the military-industrial complex. It would be interesting to analyze corporate bottom lines in relation to the cost of war and so-called aid to Iraq, the development of its infrastructure, schools, hospitals. I believe the incredible sums of our children’s and grandchildren’s money we are spending are chiefly going to corporations.

I also keep asking who benefits from keeping the world’s second largest oil reserve off-line?

Is Violence a Vestige?

Violence is a vestige of our evolutionary past. Dictionary.com defines “vestige” as:

a degenerate or imperfectly developed organ or structure that has little or no utility, but that in an earlier stage of the individual or in preceding evolutionary forms of the organism performed a useful function.

Viewing footage of sheep or rhinos or other male animals rutting, competing for the right to mate, you see that violence once served to select out the healthiest, strongest, and most adept individuals to contribute to the gene pool of the species. But we humans don’t determine individual rights based on brute force. (At least, most of us don’t.)

The Courage of a Non-Violent Future

It takes more courage to put down your weapon and fight using non-violent resistance. Yet Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both demonstrated that non-violence is more persuasive than any weapon. Non-violent resistance is not passive, it is not weak. It takes all the courage, wit, and will humans can muster.

In the coming Presidential election, Americans face a daunting choice. John McCain stands in the tradition of military force. He is honorable, though his temper could have deadly consequences if it had the world’s strongest military at his command.

Barack Obama represents the future. Much of the world identifies with him. He would be the first person of color to hold the office of President. But, more important, he voted against the war. He can demonstrate to the world that this war is not the American people’s war, but the war of a business and political elite, perhaps even the war of America’s enemies seeking to run the U.S. financially into the ground.

Not a bad strategy. You explode an IED that cost a few hundred dollars. Americans respond with weapons that cost tens of millions each. Before long, that amounts to quite a tab.

And even one life (on any side) is one too many.

A New Species?

Jesus never fought in war. His saying about bringing not peace but a sword cannot be used to justify war.

I believe that, in Jesus (yes, uniquely Son of God) and a few others, a new species is evolving, whom I call Homo spiritus, a species whose strength lies in the spiritual capacity to love and be loved, especially in the sense of agape love, and especially in the case of loving those whom it’s not easy or “natural” to love.

We have reached a turning point in human history, in fact in the history of all life on the planet. We will either learn to live together in peace, mutual respect, and cooperation, solving together the immense problems that we face, or we will die.

Unlike the dinosaurs, we still have a choice.