++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ARCHIVE.
For a list of all my published posts:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Blog
entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and
reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer
have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent
essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them
with all who are interested.
If
you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a
note: sam@macspeno.com
Post
#130 is about a book which might have been called "Saints Updated."
===
All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses
For Our Time, by Robert Ellsberg (Crossroad Pub. Co., 1997).
This is not a typical “lives of the saints.” It includes many of
the old time saints, of course, but like Robert Lentz’s icons it includes many
modern people whose lives are significant for the rest of us.
It is in fact an extraordinary collection of biographies; or
maybe, better, a collection of extraordinary biographies. I found it
enlightening and inspiring-- especially helpful in terms of my own
self-understanding. And it was fun to see listed as “saints” several people
with whom I have had some slight contact.
===
One of the most interesting things for me is the fact that most of
these “saints” seem to fall into one of four categories, and which, with my
"mandalic affliction," I see as expressions of the Jungian
personality types.
One large group are the ascetics; they were more common in earlier
times. [Today, this type is more likely to be found working out in the local
health club.] They are unique in that they seem to inflict a degree of violence
on themselves in their effort to escape from the world-- whether for them
“world” has the dualistic meaning of matter, body and females, or the more
conventional sense of the human society and culture.
Another large group of these saints are the activists, people who
fight to make the world better by their work in trying to eliminate injustices
of all kinds. A large fraction of activists meet violent ends.
It is amazing how much violence this book about saints contains!
Suffering seems to be an aspect of sainthood, whether it is
self-imposed as with the ascetics, or imposed externally as with the activists
and martyrs, who are always a threat, one way or another, to authority and
power.
I thought one of the grossest examples of violence (psychological
violence in this case) was the story of the founder of a religious order who
was thrown out of the very order he founded.
A third group of “saints” are those who aim to live peacefully and
quietly. They live lives of quiet devotion as followers of a “little way” (like
St Theresa of Lisieux) or the “hidden life” (or "life of Nazareth,” as
practiced by hermits like Charles de Foucauld), or of service to the poorest of
the poor (as with Mother Theresa’s order).
===
A personal thought. It seems to me that these “ways” are
expressions of the functions of consciousness-- Thinking, Sensation, and
Feeling-- and that I don’t fit any of them. I wouldn’t last 24 hours as an
ascetic, I’m clearly not an activist, and a hidden life or little way just
seems too sentimental for my tastes.
What’s left? There is a fourth consciousness function, and so
there ought to be a fourth group of saints to go with it.
And there is. These are the “saints” who I find most attractive.
Since Intuition [or "Imagery," as it is perhaps more accurately
called] is their primary function, they seem to be able to see more than
others. [They are "seers" and have a bigger picture of reality.]
Their passion is to make sense of our existence, to manifest
life’s goodness, beauty and holiness. I see them falling into two main groups.
One group are the updaters and innovators, whether in ethics,
philosophy, theology, science or other areas of academic endeavor. They try to
say things in new ways, and many of them, like the activist saints, suffer for
it.
Unlike the activists, however, these pioneers and explorers of new
perspectives tend to suffer at the hands of the church. At best, their creative
intellectual efforts are ignored.'
But more often they are criticized and condemned-- they are
refused the right to teach or publish, for example-- and often they have been
imprisoned and tortured, even killed, at the direction of church authorities.
In spite of all this, many of them exhibit a degree of loyalty to
organized religion which is nothing less than amazing. The institutional
churches seems to represent for them something which is, in fact, far beyond--
far deeper than-- anything the external churches apparently can represent.
Perhaps nowhere is this groups of "saints" ability to
see more than the rest of us more evident than their loyalty to a greatly
tarnished tradition.
===
The second group of Intuitive seers are those who are especially
sensitive to the goodness and beauty and holiness of the world. Their passion is
to express the sacredness of reality in art, music, literature and other
sacramental forms. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these mystics and
visionaries-- more sensitive than the rest of us to the meaning and holiness of
existence-- simply exist apart from the church. Tragic.
Of these two groups, I find those scientists with great
imaginative insight, like Teilhard de Chardin, Giordano Bruno and Galileo,
highly attractive. But I find myself even more attracted to “saints” like
George Rouault, William Blake and Vincent van Gogh. This surprised me.
Also of personal interest is the fact that very few of these
creative “saints” have anything explicitly to do with religious ritual. One
more or less isolated example is the 20th century liturgical reformer, Dom
Virgil Michael, of St John’s Abbey in Minnesota.
Others are those 16th century Jesuits who tried to live as Chinese
or Japanese sages, and the 20th century Benedictine monk Bede Griffith, who
lived the life of a Hindu holy man. A slim list, to be sure!
We have a ways to go!
===
There is one ecological “saint,” the Brazilian rubber plantation
activist and martyr, Chico Mendes. He connected the cry of the poor and the cry
of the Earth to such an extent that he was “unable to distinguish justice for
the poor from defense of the Amazon rain forests.”
Some areas of human endeavor, such as anthropology and psychology,
remain to be represented. Imagine! There are no “saints” to be found among the
anthropologists-- those who study human nature!
And of course neither Freud nor Jung is mentioned in this list of
all saints.
But the very fact that we don’t expect them to be there-- although
they are, in fact, the founders of the modern “science of the soul”-- says
something. Something important.
We have a ways to go, indeed!
===
Perhaps the most interesting saint in this collection is Maura
O’Halloran, a Boston-born, Irish-American, Catholic-Buddhist saint of
compassion. (I’d never heard of her, either!)
Her statue is venerated by Eastern and Western pilgrims in a
temple in Tokyo, where at the age of 25, in the early 1980s, she went to
practice zazen.
She stayed three years, and was killed in a bus accident in
Thailand on her way back to Ireland.
Her roshi said of her that she achieved in 28 years what took
Sakamuni himself 80 years.
She said of herself that she felt she had done everything in her
life she was meant to do and had now only to live for others. Having attained
what her adopted Zen tradition calls "enlightenment," she planned--
like Teresa of Lisieux, with whom is she compared-- to spend her heaven “doing
good on earth.”
Some letters she sent home and diary from her time as a monk are
collected in a small book: Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind: The Zen Journal and
Letters of Maura “Soshin” O’Halloran (Charles Tuttle Co, 1994).
Update (some extra notes I recently found on this book): To my delight and astonishment, the county library had a copy. She was no weirdo. She mentions going to a rock concert, drinking beer and smoking a cigar at 3 AM, then getting up to clean the toilets at 4 AM. Stuff like that. I am impressed.
To add to the Litany of the Saints:
Holy Maura-san, pray for us!
Update (some extra notes I recently found on this book): To my delight and astonishment, the county library had a copy. She was no weirdo. She mentions going to a rock concert, drinking beer and smoking a cigar at 3 AM, then getting up to clean the toilets at 4 AM. Stuff like that. I am impressed.
To add to the Litany of the Saints:
Holy Maura-san, pray for us!
ALL SAINTS of God, intercede for us!
+++
No comments:
Post a Comment