Notes on the way

My days are mostly spent in a semi-darkened room in a nursing home in St. Paul, in a chair next to my father's bed, where he lies very quietly, almost immobile, usually silent but still quite cognizant.  Often my mother sits in a chair on the other side, reading a book or reminiscing, trying to understand various things.  I'm a long way from Rhode Island, my wife, my bookshelves, scribblings.  But it seems to help to sit next to my father, sometimes take the hand he reaches out, to show me his grip is still strong.  I'm not thinking very clearly or energetically these days.  I'd like to get back to my poems.  But I do experience amorphous globular sub-thoughts, now & then.

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The moral law is universal, it has to do with the human in a personal sense.  And therefore I myself, as an individual, am responsible not only for my own actions, but also for their repercussions, their consequences, their effect on my own soul.

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"Soul" as a term does not carry much weight or bear much prestige within the "high civilizations" of our time.  There are so many sophisticated doctrines which appear especially devoted to explaining it away.  & yet psychology as a mode of thought still seems to retain some vestigial authority.  Psychologists used to be called, in popular parlance, "soul doctors".

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Conscience is a modality of soul, a faculty of mind, which is responsible for the orientation of the person toward justice and righteousness.  The soul is immortal and conscience is its guardian.

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The soul is a dimension of the individual person.  History is a pantomime of conflicting allegiances and group identifications, a struggle for power - drawn with stock figures and broad strokes, like a commedia dell'arte melodrama.  But "what shall a man give for his soul?"  Or what they used to call "our sacred honor"?  Your conscience?  This is where the real battles are won & lost.  Jesus said it another way, too : "The kingdom of heaven is in your midst, but men do not see it."

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Sometimes I think the most profound saying is this : "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."  The "quality of life" is planted not in the newspaper or the headline news, but rather in your own soul : your actions and their results.  "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."  "Give, and you shall receive."

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"Wisdom cries out in the streets..."  I read it today in the newspaper.  A Turkish Armenian, thinking about the 1915 genocide and the denials which followed it, is quoted as saying (& I paraphrase from memory), "Life used to be about persons, what they did, good or bad.  It didn't matter so much what group you came from or what religion you professed.  It was about people - the people you knew and lived with, good and bad.  But now you are judged by what group you come from."

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But the path of history is with the 99% of traits we all share as humankind, not the surface distinctions we make and the lines we draw between skin colors, nations of origin, religious proclamations, ethnic traditions... the sentimental patterns of parochial pride.  Ban Ki-Moon, the U.N. Secretary General, pleaded for more such universal understandings and actions in a recent & passionate speech to the National Press Club.

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The notion of human freedom is grounded in a metaphysical or cosmic sense.  The idea of "the kingdom of heaven" is an intellectual idea, a kind of Euclidean proposition.

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Kingship is archaic, traceable perhaps back to the primates.  A figure of authority, a powerful person, a charismatic figure, a scapegoat, is the personification of cosmic wholeness, the Origin, the Source.  The tribe gathers around this conduit of otherwise uncontrollable fates and life-threatening dangers.

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I see the Bible as threading back to a very archaic rivalry between the nomadic tribes of herdsmen, on the one hand, whose life is based on relatively simple choices under an open sky, and close kinship - and the early royal empires, based on the agricultural revolution and the expansion of political dominion.  Kingship vs. kinship.  The nomads domesticated animals so they could carry their food with them; the kings domesticated human herds to grow their food for them.  These different social structures had implications for their thought-worlds.  Abraham was guided by his personal God to leave home & head for a certain place.  This would not happen in Pharaonic Egypt.  For the Egyptians, God was always mediated/disguised by the divine Ruler and his ceremonies.

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Life is lived in the individual soul, the outcomes of our response to the whisper of conscience.  Sovereignty belongs to the Origin, the Creator, the "ground" of our being.  Moral freedom, what Roger Williams called "soul liberty".   Of course these notions have implications for the social & political formations we have made on earth.  I see a future world of civil society, rooted in free peoples, aware of their rights and willing to sacrifice so that every person shares the same dignity.  Not judging and condemning one another, but showing tolerance and mercy, as befits the love which gives life to the roots of the soul itself.

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"Children of God."  "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

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The "glory" of the Artist who fashions the cosmos is manifest in the everyday good works of her children.  As Jesus puts it in the Gospels, "Wisdom is justified in all her children."  So the spinning planet produces flowers... in my homespun soul-dream.