Struggle, Striving, and Happiness

Haven't posted much this summer. That is about to change. Since buying a Kindle about a year ago, my new reading habit has been to download more books than I can possibly read. A lot them are free or only $0.99 and they arrive few seconds after a click. So, I'm reading several of them in parallel and it sometimes takes months to finish some of them. When I encounter the same thought in two different books within a few days, it seems significant.

Have been reading Arthur Zajonc's "Meditation As Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love" for two reasons. One, his book "Catching the Light" was marvelous. (Blogged about that earlier here). The other reason is that I'm wanting to explore meditation. Here is a quotation from a section:

Arthur Zajonc

I have long been attracted to the line by Einstein,“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves...."  Happiness is really not the goal of life. Einstein’s life was not a commitment to happiness but a long commitment to inquiry. Goethe’s Faust seals his bargain with the devil Mephistopheles promising to go with him if he, Faust, would ever say to the passing moment, “Tarry, thou art so fair!” In other words, Goethe saw striving, not bliss, as the central core of our humanity. Citing Augustine, Thomas Merton described human development as proceeding not in steps but via a sequence of “yearnings.”66
And later, Zajonc says:

Of course, I am not advocating suffering, but it is intrinsic to a life rightly lived. Struggle and suffering are inevitably associated with aspiration and compassionate concern. After all, compassion literally means “to suffer with.”

 A few days later, was reading one of Brian McLaren's more recent books,

"Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words." And, his thoughts follow the above and expand.  

Brian McLaren

Sooner or later we need to accept two truths that both the book of Genesis and the theory of evolution teach us: life isn’t supposed to be easy, and struggle can lead to growth. In Genesis, God creates a universe characterized neither by fully ordered stasis nor complete chaos, but rather by order and chaos in dynamic tension. In that matrix, we experience the stresses of struggle, change, and competition that challenge us to evolve, to grow, to become.

.................

The apostle Paul says that we celebrate our sufferings, because they produce in us endurance, which in turn produces character, which in turn produces hope, which in turn makes us receptive to the outpouring of God’s love in our hearts (Rom. 5:3–5).

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The apostle James, as we have seen already, says we should receive trials into our lives with joy, because, again, trials work like a fertilizer for the growth of character (1:2–4). Without trials, we would be morally sterile, lacking qualities like endurance, maturity, and wisdom.

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There are days, of course, when we wish there could be some other system. We wish there could be a way of developing patience without delay, courage without danger, forgiveness without offense, generosity without need, skill without discipline, endurance without fatigue, persistence without obstacles, strength without resistance, virtue without temptation, and strong love without hard-to-love people. But it turns out that there is no other way. The Creator has created the right kind of universe to produce these beautiful qualities in us creatures. And among these beautiful qualities is interdependence—the ability to reach out beyond ourselves, to ask for help from others and from God, and to offer help as we are able. The whole shebang is rigged for mutuality, for vital connection. The theory of evolution teaches the same lesson. If survival were easy, species wouldn’t develop new adaptive features. If survival were stress-free, there wouldn’t be 20,000 species of butterflies, 300 species of turtles, or 18,937 species of birds (at last count). In fact, there would be no butterflies, turtles, or birds at all, because it was stress, struggle, challenge, and change that prompted the first living things—slimy blobs in a tide pool somewhere—to diversify, specialize, adapt, and develop into the wonders that surround us and include us now. Seen in this light, evolution isn’t a grim theory of “nature red in tooth and claw” it depicts the planet as a veritable laboratory for innovations in beauty and diversity, fitness and adaptability, complexity and harmony.2 It renders the earth a studio for the creative development of interdependence in ecosystems or societies of life. Put beauty, diversity, complexity, and harmonious interdependence together and you have something very close to the biblical concepts of “glory” and shalom.

.............

So both science and faith tell us that we find ourselves in a universe whose preset conditions challenge us to ongoing growth, development, and connection.

 

Back from Wedding and Vacation

Been a while since posting.  Two weeks ago we were in New Albany, MS for Marcus' wedding.  Had a wonderful time.  Afterwards, Dorothy and I stayed in their house, watching the dogs and doing chores, while they honeymoon-cruised to Cozumel.

Had a chance to get a few pictures myself but not as many as I wanted as I didn't get the settings right on my new camera.  Here's the wedding party.  My dad officiated.  His first service since back surgery 6-weeks earlier and he did fine.  Dorothy spent many weeks planning and working with Suzy for the wedding. 

Suzy's family.

Before the wedding in the Church of the Nazarene.

Nice BW pic that Derek took.

After the ceremony, Marcus and Suzy enter the reception area.

Crowd shots at reception.

The couple with two groomsmen in the foreground.

Dorothy, seen here talking with my Dad, was indefagitable.  It's taken two weeks for her to wind down.

Below is the very fine video that Derek's wife, Catherine, made of this wonderful event.  For more on the wedding go to our Facebook pages.

Marcus and Suzy's Wedding Video by Catherine

We Must Do What is Difficult

It seems I've followed this advice to an extreme in my life.  Just came across an interesting article by Jocelyn K. Glei of the "99%" web site. It is about something that wonderful poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, had written.   In Letters to a Young Poet he wrote:

from letter 7:

We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.  

From letter 8 re: embracing difficulty

If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

Looking back on my life of now 60 years I can see that I did this, sometimes to a fault, actually.  Sometimes taking more on that I could handle.  But it is the way I've lived.  One reason, beside my love for the subject, that I majored in Physics was because it was perceived as being very difficult.  Didn't have to go to the U of Va, either, to continue my studies.  My Memphis State advisor said it was out of my league.  I  made it through, however.  And so on. Just got back from a nine day business trip, wondering if I've taken on too much.   Sometimes now I feel I'm ready to get off the treadmill.    Glad to have read this for the pick me up.

On the Nature of Emergent Reality

Have been glancing at "The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion" edited by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies.   A chapter titled On the Nature of Emergent Reality is authored by George F. R. Ellis and closes with: 

Strong reductionist claims, usually characterized by the phrase 'nothing but' and focusing only on physical existence, simply do not take into account the depth of causation in the real world as indicated above, nor the inability of physics on its own to comprehend these interactions and effects.  Reductionist claims represent a typical fundamentalist position, claiming a partial truth (based on some subset of causation) to be the whole truth and ignoring the overall rich causal matrix while usually focusing on purely physical elements of causation.  They do not  and cannot be an adequate basis of explanation or understanding in the real world. 

I believe the evidence he gives in the chapter backs up this conclusion.  At one time it seemed to me that Laplace's statement about all reality being reducible to points and forces on them was, depressingly, true.  I wanted a way of escape from that but couldn't see logically how to get out of it.  I had  no knowledge of the principal of emergence and the possibility of top-down causality.  Now I do have a little knowledge of it and hope to learn more.

I’m particularly adept at making mistakes — Dyson Vacuum Inventor

I’m particularly adept at making mistakes—it’s a necessity as an engineer. . . . I love mistakes. 

This is a quote from a Newsweek article ( June 6, 2011, page 61) from James Dyson, the inventor and developer of a famous vacuum cleaner.  We have one and we like it very much.  Looking back, I see that in both my domestic and professional lives, fear of making mistakes has prevented me from being as productive and fruitful as I could have been.  Thanks for this fine sermon, James.

What if I Were Romeo in Black Jeans

The year 1990 was not a good one in rock music. Reading a list of music titles from that year I remember only a few. But Sunday morning, unbidden, one tune from the era popped into my head. It was the year I was on a leave of absence from Oak Ridge and we lived in Charlottesville, VA where I was doing medical research at UVA. (It is a long story but it was great to be at least a small part of an initial effort that eventually led to the formation of the medical company Stereotaxis). I worked out regularly that year, running and lifting weights.  Only one song I recall from the endless cycles of music played in the gyms.  It is No Myth by Michael Penn.  So that morning I went to You Tube and refamiliarized myself with it.  Memorable lines:

She hopes we can be friends

We said goodbye before hello

What if I were Romeo in Black Jeans 

She's just looking for someone to Dance with.  

Then surfed the net for commentary.  Here are some interesting thoughts from the web site titled Stylist.  They state that everyone has some special pieces of music in their head that strike a special chord inside of them.  The reviewer is Alfred Soto:

Penn’s whiney pipes suit lyrics whose wisdom is encapsulated in the declarative simplicity of the admission, “She hopes we can be friends” and in the useful “We said goodbye before hello.” Handling bass, all guitars, and a galloping drum program that’s the song’s most striking element, the auteur palliates his Dylan-esque sneer with a demo-style directness. That’s the best that can be said about “No Myth”—it’s a demo unsullied by additional tinkering ...

Like all the best rock songs, “No Myth” asks questions it refuses to answer; its creator’s sullenness dovetails with the song’s mystery. We know (and he knows we know) that Penn isn’t Romeo in black jeans; he’s a guy with long bangs and a rather lugubrious self-possession, brother of one of Hollywood’s more masochistically naturalistic actors, too anonymous to be the subject of any myths, be they romantic or aesthetic. The most telling moment occurs during the bridge, in which Penn slings polysyllabic rhymes like Ted Nugent doing scales. It’s lovely, plaintive; bravado replaces snark. . . 

After not hearing or thinking of this song for twenty years, I know it will be bouncing around in my head for the next several weeks.

Music as the Language of God

Marvelous Quote from the movie Copying Beethoven. Been on my tab for so long I forgot where I first saw it.

"The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are."
— Stephen J. Rivele

Doubts/Community

I happened across the blog Everyday Liturgy while looking for something Peter Rollins said.  EL lists a number of pithy things heard from Peter at a 2009 event.  It actually describes how I've lived my life, i think.

-we all have doubts—the important point is not to always have total belief but to participate in the tradition and belong to community

From Raptitude: Why Your Fears Won't Come True

I'm suddenly realising that fear has characterised my life more than I thought it had.  Why do I procrastinate making that call or doing that chore or planning that meeting?  As I was coming to this notion, it was my good fortune to read a wonderful antidote from the blog Raptitude.  Here's a snippet.  But you should read the entire post here. 

...

What you fear can’t really happen

What I’ve come to realize is that all my fears of the future are actually fears of the past.  

Each of us has a whole bank of awful moments in our memories, each of which are so painful that we can’t accept that we could experience the same pain again.  

If the thought of something you want to do rouses fear in you, think: what is the experience — the feeling — I’m actually fearing here? You don’t have to psychoanalyze yourself and try to figure out the childhood memory it comes from, but it doesn’t take much thought to identify the precise experience you can’t bear to risk happening.

By obeying our fears from arm’s length, we end up cordoning off enormous areas of possibility. Life is inescapably risky and painful, not to mention 100% fatal. So don’t think you can dodge pain, awkwardness or by backing down from something a bit scary.

The real bad stuff isn’t going to be something you had the foresight to worry about anyway. From Baz Luhrmann’s famous speech: “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.”

...

The Spiritual Meaning of Trees

Last Wednesday was my turn to do the devotional talk at church.  Decided many months ago to do it on the Spiritual Meaning of Trees.  The poem of a few weeks ago was the meditation that started me down that path.  This post is a result of my study and preparation for that talk.

Trees are in the background and in the foreground of the Bible.  From the beginning to end.  They are a critical part of the action.  The Tree of Life is mentioned early in the Genesis and also in the last chapter of Revelation, for example.  There are over thirty kinds of them mentioned in the Bible.  Some like the olive tree are mentioned quite often and are well know to us, both as to physical, literal manifestation and some of its symbolic meaning, ie. you know what the olive branch signifies.  In some cases it is not certain what kind of tree it is that is being described. 

Perhaps you didn't realize it but trees figure in the story of Abraham, in several places.  For instance, after the call to leave Ur we are told in Genesis 12: 6  Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.  "Moreh" means teacher.  It was a significant tree for Abraham and the Canaanites.  Was some kind of school there? Was it an Oak?  Some think it was.

As it turns out, a few days before my talk, the significance of trees for our contemporary culture was illustrated by the recent reaction to the poisoning of the Toomer Oaks of Auburn University.  There was quite an uproar.  Auburn fans are justifiably feeling hurt and disappointment.  (Rather than post a link, the reader can google to find various descriptions and pictures.)

Each tree brings its own blessing to us.  Not only do trees provide food, medicine, shade, shelter, and other useful items for our lives but many useful images and metaphors to learn from.  Hence the admonition for us to be a tree that bears good fruit.  Or to be rooted.  Or that if we'll be righteous we'll "grow like a Cedar of Lebanon" (Ps 92:12).  There are of course many other Biblical examples of this.

Here are some of the links to interesting articles on this subject. Quotes from them are in italics. 

The Spirituality of Trees

 The tree is one of humankind's most powerful symbols. It is the embodiment of life in all its realms: the point of union between heaven, earth and water. In most mythology and ancient religious imagery, the tree was believed to have an abundance of divine creative energy. 
-by the Rev Lisa Ward delivered at Unitarian Univesalist Fellowship 2000 Harford County.

The Archetypal Symbolism of Trees

Trees have long held a literal and symbolic fascination for humanity. Their source as a deep archetype of absorption begins with the earliest epic in the Western World, the story of Gilgamesh and his quest for the plant of life (a symbolic tree) that is snatched away by a serpent, thus illustrating that the use of the tree as a universal religious symbol is incredibly ancient; such utilization can be dated to at least the third millennium B.C.E. as a symbol of a rich cultural mythos, the major archetype being that of the center, the beginning where sacred powers first originated. The tree is the navel of the world, the "cosmic axis" (Axis mundi) standing at the universe's center where it passes through the middle and unites the three great cosmic domains: the underworld, earth, and sky (Roth, Stephanie. The Tree of Life, The Ecologist. Jan. 2000 v30il. TEL. ASAP. 18 Aug. 2003.).

My closing thought:

Amazingly, these ancient pagans got it right.  Their mythologies are not literally true but thy intuited something of depth and validity.  Even before it happened.  The Cross is that Tree.  And it cannot be escaped how that event changed the world and the course of history.

The Human Future

Placed the comment below to this blog post titled The Human Future by Jack Whelan.

Jack said "We're in the habit of looking toward the future in the rear-view mirror, and we assume fundamental continuity with incremental changes."

Yes, that is right.  I'm 60 now, and recall thinking with pride and optimism and excitement when I was 10 that now I'm living in a truly modern world. We went to space that year. And I expected technology change in the way usually depicted by the magazine covers of say Popular Science and as science fiction films of the fifties showed it. (recall a futuristic space travelling serial show where they used slide rules!) But not many if any anticipated what has happened and how wonderfully things would unfold.  We had the VCR and personal computer revolution in the eighties, the internet in the nineties, social media (bringing with it this blog) in the 2000's.  Marvelous medical and communication advances. Don't think many saw it coming about like this.  Definitely not me and I'm an R&D engineer with a PhD.   Perhaps Teilhard du Chardin.  I listened to a book review in Philosophy of Religion Class forty years  ago and thought he was crazy.  Not looking so much that way now.

See 1959 Popular Science Covers here.  I especially recall seeing things like on the July cover - cars without wheels.

Trees - The Most Effective Preachers

iStockphoto

Trees have always been the most effective preachers for me.  I revere them when they live in nations and families, in forests and groves.  And I revere them even more when they stand singly.  They are like solitaries.  Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, isolated men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.  The world murmurs in their tops, their roots rest in the infinite; however, they do not lose themselves in it but, with all the energy of their lives, aspire to only one thing:  to fulfill their own innate law, to enlarge their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is more sacred, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.  When a tree has been sawed off and shows its naked mortal wound to the sun, one can read its whole history on the bright disc of its stump and tombstone:  in its annual rings and cicatrizations are faithfully recorded all struggle, all suffering, all sickness, all fortune and prosperity, meager years and luxuriant years, attacks withstood, storms survived.  And every farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that, high in the mountains and in ever-present danger, the most indestructible, most powerful, most exemplary tree trunks grow.


Trees are sanctuaries.  He who knows how to speak to them, to listen to them, learns the truth.  They do not preach doctrines and recipes, they preach the basic law of life, heedless of details.

A tree speaks:  In me is hidden a core, a spark, a thought, I am life of eternal life.  The experiment and throw [of the dice] that the eternal mother ventured on me is unique, unique is my shape and the system of veins in my skin, unique are the slightest play of foliage at my top and the smallest scar in my bark.  It is my office to shape and show the Eternal in the distinctively unique.  


A tree speaks:  My strength is trust.  I know nothing of my fathers, I know nothing of the thousand children which come out of me every year.  I live the mystery of my seed to the end, nothing else is my concern.  I trust that God is within me.  I trust that my task is sacred.  In this trust I live.

When we are sad and can no longer endure life well, a tree can speak to us:  Be calm!  Be calm! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is hard.  These are childish thoughts.  Let God talk within you and they will grow silent.  You are anxious because your road leads you away from your mother and your home.  But every step and day lead you anew to your mother.  Home is neither here nor there.  Home is inside you or nowhere.


A yearning to wander tears at my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind in the evening.  If one listens quietly and long, the wanderlust too shows its core and meaning.  It is not a wish to run away from suffering, as it seemed.  It is a yearning for home, for the memory of one's mother, for new symbols of life.  It leadshomeward.  Every road leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is the mother. 


Thus the tree rustles in the evening when we are afraid of our own childish thoughts.  Trees have long thoughts, long in breath and calm, as they have a longer life than we.  They are wiser than we, as long as we do not listen to them.  But when we have learned to listen to trees, the very brevity and swiftness and childish haste of our thoughts acquire an incomparable joy.  He who has learned to listen to trees no longer desires to be a tree.  He does not desire to be anything but that which he is.  That is home.  That is happiness.

by Hermann Hesse from Wanderings:  Notes and Sketches

Translation from First German Reader:  A Beginner's Dual-Language Book, edited by Harry Steinhauer, page 12-17.  Bantam Language Edition published 1964, 6th printing.  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:  64-7673.

Miserere Mei Deus - Kings College Chapel Choir

You gotta here this.  Relax .......

Depth - from Tor Norretranders

This is lifted from Edge:  The World Question Center

The question is WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

 There are many responses and this one jumped out at me as it correlates with an interest of this blog.  I snipped out some interesting paragraphs in order to prevent this post from being too long.
---------------------------------------------

TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The Generous Man and The User Illusion
 

Depth 

Depth is what you do not see immediately at the surface of things. Depth is what is below that surface: a body of water below the surface of a lake, the rich life of a soil below the dirt or the spectacular line of reasoning behind a simple statement.
 

Depth is a straightforward aspect of the physical world. Gravity stacks stuff and not everything can be at the top. Below there is more and you can dig for it.

Depth acquired a particular meaning with the rise of complexity science a quarter of a century ago: What is characteristic of something complex? Very orderly things like crystals are not complex. They are simple. Very messy things like a pile of litter are very difficult to describe: They hold a lot of information. Information is a measure of how difficult something is to describe. Disorder has a high information content and order has a low one. All the interesting stuff in life is in-between: Living creatures, thoughts and conversations. Not a lot of information, but neither a little. So information content does not lead us to what is interesting or complex. The marker is rather the information that is not there, but was somehow involved in creating the object of interest. The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pin-point what is interesting to us. 
 

It is not the informational surface of the thing, but its informational depth that attracts our curiosity. It took a lot to bring it here, before our eyes. It is not what is there, but what used to be there, that matters. Depth is about that.

.... 

Most conversational statements have some kind of depth: There is more than meets the ear, something that happened between the ears of the person talking — before a statement was made. When you understand the statement, the meaning of what is being said, you "dig it", you get the depth, what is below and behind. What is not said, but meant — the exformation content, information processed and thrown away before the actual production of explicit information.

......

 

That is also the point with abstractions: We want them to be shorthand for a lot of information that was digested in the process leading to the use of the abstraction, but is not present when we use it. Such abstractions have depth. We love them. Other abstraction have no depth. They are shallow and just used to impress the other guy. They do not help us. We hate them.  Intellectual life is very much about the ability to distinguish between the shallow and the deep abstractions. You need to know if there is any depth before you make that headlong dive and jump into it.

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a new definition of religion

From Drew Tatusko of the  Notes from Off Center blog:

Religion is an externalized desire for socio-historical coherence and order by appealing to a transcendent source of coherence and order; a transcendent source of coherence and order that is itself an image of that externalized desire.

see the whole article here:

a new definition of religion