The Re-Education of Allison Causton

In Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, we find the famous line, “To err is Humane [sic]; to Forgive, Divine.”

Recently, I was watching a music documentary with a friend. In one part of the documentary there was a discussion of music production today, compared to music production 50 years ago. The point was made that now, if your band records a song and your drummer messes up the rhythm, then the technician can simply edit the recording to fix it. A studio recording technician said that some have called this a sterilization of music because everything is so perfect, but not real. The friend I was watching with turned to me and said, “I feel the same way. When a song is perfect, it isn’t alive anymore.”

When a song is perfect, it isn’t alive anymore. Could the same be said of humans? What exactly is it we are striving towards when we seek perfection? Whether it be religious, moral, personal, academic, or physical perfection, to what are we aspiring?

I have often heard people speak of a longing to be a part of Nature since Nature does not make mistakes. When a seed is planted it grows as it is supposed to grow—there is no question, no hesitation. Animals act on instincts, not judgments.  

So, while I am not a biologist, nor a philosopher by any means, I suppose I am wondering if part of being human means making mistakes. I had a wise friend once ask me if I was comfortable with my dark side. He wasn’t asking if I made a habit of indulging in immoral behaviours, but rather if I was aware of and accepting of those parts of me that are not “perfect.” I was so taken aback by the question because I had no framework for answering. I had never been asked anything comparable. The context of the question was a discussion of a husband and wife in his family, where the wife was suffering from post-partum depression and the husband was unable to accept it. He was unwilling to accept her dark side. He defied his reality and ignored what was going on. Now, I am not saying that accepting one’s dark side is just letting it be, especially in a case like that. But as Pope continues in his essay, “Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see, /Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.” He is speaking of poetry, but I believe we could just as easily substitute Piece for Person.

Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, has spent years studying the psychological connections between shame, guilt and the desire for perfection in humans. She states that our imperfections are what make us human, and that the problem lies in equating imperfection with unworthiness. In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, she writes:

Each day we face a barrage of images and ideas—from society and the media—telling us who we should be. We are led to believe that if we look perfect, live perfect, and do everything perfectly, we'd no longer struggle with feelings of inadequacy. Ironically, it's the pursuit of perfection that fuels the message 'never good enough.'

                I am not against self cultivation. Every religious tradition has rules—laws made in wisdom and love to guide and protect people from our own folly. But I do not believe that it is simply in following these commands that virtue is born. In Jacob Needleman’s Lost Christianity, he quotes a conversation between the Hindu master Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and a student on the subject of virtue and sin:

Maharaj: True virtue is divine nature. What you really are is your virtue. But the opposite of sin which you call virtue is only obedience born out of fear.

Question: Then why all the effort at being good?

Maharaj: It keeps you on the move. You wander till you find God. Then God takes you into Himself—and makes you as He is.

This idea of goodness keeping us on the move, reminds me of Galatians 3:24-25, in the New Testament, where it says that the “law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.” Once we find God, he takes us into Himself.  So we are meant to seek goodness, but not because we are afraid of the law, or afraid of how people see us. Rather we seek the betterment of ourselves until we find that God has made us as He is, and that what we really are is our virtue.

                Joseph Campbell presents a similar idea in his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Using the same root word that is found in the Galatians passage, Campbell writes that “mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man. Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight.” It is not that we should be seeking perfection, for it is precisely our imperfections that make us human. We seek virtue as a means to an end. And when we have found our aim, we will find what it means that we exist “beyond all pairs of opposites,” and that “everything is permissible.”

Through all, the transcendent force is then perceived which lives in all, in all is wonderful, and is worthy, in all, of our profound obeisance.

-Joseph Campbell

 

In her 1951 novel, Camilla Dickinson, Madeleine L’Engle writes, “You know what we need is a new God.” As I read those words, I feel two reactions. First, caution. My second reaction is a deep sense of intrigue. She goes on to point out the massive technological changes the world has experienced since the time of Christ. (I hesitate here to say technological “advances.” Further ahead on the historical timeline perhaps, but progress often feels like a step back to me, especially where pipelines are concerned.)  L’Engle states that as the technology has changed, so have we and these changes have become engrained into our way of life. The fact that I am writing a blog, which I can self-publish on the internet, and which most of you will see for the first time on a Facebook news feed on your iPhone, is a case in point. I’m only in my twenties and I am constantly shocked at how different life is from when I was a girl. L'Engle continues, “Take God. God hasn’t changed any since Jesus took him out of a white nightgown and long whiskers . . . Along about when Christ was born . . . it was time someone should conceive a new God and then have the power to give his new understanding to the world. So what we need again is a new God. The God most people are worshiping in churches and temples hasn’t grown since Christ’s time.”

As I said, my first reaction is caution. I am only here to ponder this question, to hold it in my hand—to observe it. I do not have an answer for L’Engle. However, I am intrigued.  

I suppose the reason that I am so drawn to this idea is because as my experience has expanded, it seems my idea of religion or God has not. As I have read more books, seen more paintings, and met more passionate people, I have struggled to fit these into my concept of God. A prime example in my life has been George Eliot. What am I to do with her? Where does she fit into the concept of God I have been given? I was introduced to this nineteenth century author in my fourth year of university, and instantly found a kindred spirit. Something inside of me woke up and shouted with joy when I read her works. Later I found out that having been raised in a religious household, Eliot eventually gave up her  religious belief. Her story also includes a life-long monogamous affair with a married man. Long story.  Yet her spirit shines through her writing so strongly that one can’t help but be affected. I recall overhearing a classmate of mine at our Christian university say, “Eliot’s amazing. Too bad her life was so screwed up.”  But I couldn’t dispose of her so quickly— not the woman who writes such things as, “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to each other?” I could not shake the feeling that I knew her who had penned the glowing end of her novel, Middlemarch: “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The story goes that Eliot lost her faith in the Victorian concept of God as she was translating Strauss’ Life of Jesus, an early work of German historical biblical criticism. It is said that as she worked at the translation, she would often look up from her pages to a crucifix hanging on the wall above her desk and audibly groan. Even the image of this woman, her experience outgrowing a concept of God which could not hold it any longer, brings tears to my eyes.  

Yet this is where I think I can find a resting place. It is not that her experience outgrew God. God cannot be outgrown. The mystery beyond the mystery, of which we know nothing and sense very little, must be as wide and long and deep as the universe at least. We haven’t yet found an end to the universe. Eliot’s experience was outgrowing a concept of God which had been boxed, stifled, wrapped, and sold as an answer. I wonder if in this age people are experiencing a similar “outgrowing,” that has nothing to do with God, but everything to do with the answers they’ve been given.  

 

Joseph Campbell said that the best things in the world are things we cannot speak about, mysteries which cannot be comprehended. The second best things are essentially our inward misunderstandings of those mysteries, the non-verbal concepts which are our feeble attempts to grasp at the mysteries. The third best are the things we talk about. So I suppose this blog will be filled with as many of the third best things in the world that I can write about.

I called this blog the "re-education" of myself for two reasons. One, as a shout-out to Miss Lauryn Hill's "miseducation". The second reason being that all of my life I have been taught that these third best things, the misunderstandings that we are able to verbalize, are in fact the ultimate things. But what I have learned, and continue to learn is that those third place concepts can never take the place of the mysteries. When they are set up to be some form of ultimate, attainable knowledge, the result is what the philosopher Jacob Needleman has called, "Religious fervour, 'the caricature of love,'. . . and with it fear, hatred, and violence." I have been inspired recently by watching Bill Moyers' classic interviews with Joseph Campbell, the late American mythologist. In these interviews over two decades ago, Campbell states that the basic theme of all mythology is that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one. To which Bill Moyers responds enthusiastically, "What we don't know supports what we do know." 

I have always relied heavily on my mind. I have been praised for what I know, especially in spiritual matters. I was born into a community where the mind's ability to grasp and commit to a particular symbol was the ultimate form of spirituality. The atmosphere of that community is best explained as mind to mind connections. Floating heads arguing, proving, and ultimately assured of our own correct views in the midst of a spiritual quagmire. It is not that there was no nourishment in that place, but I often felt that what it was we were hoping to accomplish was something that our minds would never be able to. About a year after leaving that community, I read Anthony Bloom's words, the late Russian Orthodox Metropolitan, in Needleman's Lost Christianity: "Man must not place his hopes in the isolated intellect. To put it another way, the hope of the mind, the wish for a relationship to Truth and Being, to God, does not lie in developing a part of the mind" (emphasis mine). Needleman goes on to argue that developing soul is what will bridge our wish for relationship to our experience of relationship.

My hope, my deepest desire, is for Truth--for those moments when everything comes together and for one pounding, pulsating moment my soul appears. The soul's appearance silences guilt, silences the critic--these fade back into unreality in the face of Pure Reality. But these moments quickly escape me. Or I seek to escape from them back into unreality, into my stable pre-conceived ideas, into comfortable communities of people with all the same ideas. But these appearances of soul, as Jacob Needleman would call them, have become my bridge to Truth. And now my life has become a seemingly endless pursuit of a Truth which I never seem to be able to grasp. Thomas Wyatt, the sixteenth century poet, once wrote of a woman that "in a net I seek to catch the wind." This image resonates with my own search for Truth, for Being, for God. I am seeking the wind.