Home Waters: A Blog

Listen in to an interview with me on KCPW on April 18, 2012 about stewardship and ecospirituality.

http://kcpw.org/blog/cityviews/2012-04-17/cityviews-41812-eco-spiritualityiridescence/

Every night I hear piano practicing in the house—my son, Sam, and my daughter, Camilla, working tirelessly. Sometimes Chopin, sometimes popular songs my daughter likes to learn and quietly sing to. And over the last few months, almost nightly I hear the sound of the small plying voice of my boy, exploring old Beatles classics on his not always perfectly tuned guitar. Just last week I was in Nashville for a conference and a friend and I made it into one of the night clubs to hear live blues music. It was so loud we had to shout to make ourselves heard to one another. But the music made me so happy I wanted to cry. Earlier this winter I flew with my son to Los Angeles just for the chance to hear two Mahler symphonies performed by the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra with my brother, Bill. At the conclusion of Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony, one of the more extraordinary pieces of music ever composed, the choir sings words that Mahler composed himself, riffing off of lines first written by the poet Klopstock.

What was created

Must perish,

What perished, rise again!

Cease from trembling!

Prepare yourself to live!

O Pain, You piercer of all things,

From you, I have been wrested!

O Death, You masterer of all things,

Now, are you conquered!

With wings which I have won for myself,

In love’s fierce striving,

I shall soar upwards

To the light which no eye has penetrated!

Its wing that I won is expanded,

and I fly up.

Sam felt shaken by the experience although he didn’t quite have the words for it. Neither did my brother or I, although we were joined in a surfeit of emotion. Music does this trick with thoughts, expressing them not as ideas, at least not at first, but as sounds, and as sounds, they are abstractions, feelings, pulses felt in the blood. Ideas seem secondary to rhythm, to moving and complimentary tones that must first seduce us into a certain mood into which ideas gently drop as their setting. That is not to say that ideas do not matter or that all of truth could be summarized as feeling. But as the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno says in his marvelous book, The Tragic Sense of Life, “the end purpose of life is to live, not to understand.” Music enables such living by reminding us of the full bodied medium in which language and ideas take place—in mouths and in ears, with tongues, beating hearts and breathing lungs, flowing blood in the veins— which is why so often we are content with wordless sounds. Perhaps we enjoy being relieved of the burden of thought without being relieved of the privilege of deeply knowing and trusting. Perhaps music reminds us that there is no salvation without a body, no heaven without earth, nothing more important to yearn for except that which we already have.

What are these wings that Mahler feels takes him heavenward, these wings he has earned somehow through the “fierce striving” of love? Why does the wing expand, increasing his ecstasy, as he prepares to live? Why must one die in order to learn to begin again, to finally, truly be alive? Is music somehow taking us through this journey, teaching us to die a little so we can prepare to live? Critics say Mahler is characterized more by his search for God than for his declaration of having found Him. Does it signify a mere metaphor to call it, as we do, his Resurrection Symphony? Why is this striving for God so deeply moving if it is based on an agony, a striving, rather than on arrival? Why, for that matter, would the raw, off-key sounds of a boy copying popular refrains or the quiet joy of a girl at her piano feel like a kind of gritty poetry of the soul? Why can’t I distinguish any longer between the joys of an old Gibson guitar and the soaring ecstasies of dozens of violins moving in unison, between the otherworldly refrains of sacred music and the earth-stained strains of love songs? Call me greedy, but I want all of it. Music makes me feel that I just might be so fortunate.

I am very excited to offer an ecospirituality workshop with Rev. Tom Goldsmith in Montana this summer. You can learn more about the center and the workshop at

According to the essays of Octavio Paz, finding unity not despite but in our differences is the ultimate quest of a democracy. And it is also the ultimate quest of literature, which practices this work of communion in language. A metaphor builds a bridge between two unlike things and holds them together in relationship to produce a new meaning or a new unity, without, paradoxically, destroying or diminishing their differences. What generates new meanings is precisely a metaphor’s refusal to pass definitive judgment about difference, but instead it holds forth in hope that a new possibility will emerge once differences are seen as partners, not oppositions. Paz says that this work of literature is akin to what the Christian world calls charity. Forbearance and longsuffering are patient with contradiction or dissonance and thus allow becoming. Paz was not the first to argue that social and environmental well-being depends on the health and vitality of the humanities—particularly literature and the arts—because of how they teach the human mind to work patiently with and through differences, whether those differences pertain to class, gender, sexuality, race, or religion, or whether they pertain to the broader quest of understanding our humanity in relation to plants, animals, and the cosmos itself.

In her new book, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson similarly argues: “Democracy in its essence and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement.” There is much to digest in that sentence. A community is only as large as the love that can encompass it. Moreover, tepid tolerance is not love, and love, she suggests, can only stem from the imagination. Direct experience will never provide enough exposure to the varieties of humankind that comprise a broad community. I often think of the character Pilate from Toni Morrison’s novel, The Song of Solomon, who says shortly before she dies: “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would have loved ‘em all.” Such expectation requires real imagination and a deep consideration of the bald fact that every person possesses a unique humanity. And then the real kicker: such imaginative love must hold forth against the very real presence of profound disagreement.

Robinson explains how much is at stake in maintaining a generous vision of possibility:

Since we are human beings, turbulence is to be expected. If the effect of turbulence is to drive me or anyone back on some narrower definition of identity, then the moderating effects of broader identification are lost. And this destroys every community—not only through outright suppression or conflict. Those who seemingly win are damaged inwardly and insidiously because they have betrayed the better nature and the higher teaching of their community in descending to exclusion, suppression, or violence. Those of us who accept a historical tradition find ourselves feeling burdened by its errors and excesses, especially when we are pressed to make some account of them. I would suggest that those who reject the old traditions on these grounds are refusing to accept the fact that the tragic mystery of human nature has by no means played itself out, and that wisdom, which is almost another name for humility, lies in accepting one’s own inevitable share in human fallibility.

If we expect to make a vital contribution to a community comprised of a shared and noble purpose—whether it is our place of work, our religion, our government, or our nation—we must anticipate turbulence. And like the turbulence we suffer on the occasional cross-country flight, it must be endured by buckling down, not by panic or anger and certainly not by being oblivious to it. I am amazed at our sustained capacity for holding up an image of our enemies that draws only from their very worst tendencies. The telltale sign that this kind of dishonesty prevails is when people who depart institutions, communities, or relationships that they once loved deny any and all evidence of a more complex picture of what they left behind, particularly any evidence that things were or are getting better. They want a fixed image of what is or of what has been and refuse to see communities for what they are striving to become. The popularity of Facebook gags about the idiots on the other side only seem to suggest that polemics is the new tyranny. Just witness how hardline conservatives and liberals continually need to see each other, or the ways in which similar polarizations arise around gay marriage, climate change, religion, or public education. Each side looks past the other, needing the other to be so easily identifiable as the incarnation of stupidity or moral turpitude, so much so that we almost seem to have been willing to act our respective parts in this parade of opposition, becoming just that stupid. Imagine how differently we would speak and think and act if we started with an imagined love for people we did not know but who were characterized in our minds by something closer to their best, rather than their worst, qualities.

Maybe this is starting to sound naïve, as if real conflicts and real enemies did not exist or not much was ever at stake. But it seems to be that precisely when so much is at stake, the commitment to an imaginative love in the face of difference rises to its true character as moral courage. A love of enemies today would not pretend to ignore the real differences that exist, but, like a good metaphor, it would seek to build a relationship between differences, hoping that in this patient work we might begin to find a way out of the tedious back-and-forth tennis match that is our contemporary culture. Robinson wants us to believe that because, as human beings, we are uniquely capable of producing fiction, of imagining and even loving beings who exist only in our minds, we are well suited to the task. The fact of fiction’s existence, let alone its importance to us or its occasional rise to artistic excellence, is a reminder that we do this work all the time. All it takes is the courage to treat our lived reality with the same imaginative love that repeatedly teaches us the humanity of fictional strangers who through the alchemy of art become our beloved lifelong companions. Such courage might be a gift, but I suspect it comes to those who want it badly enough.

Marilynne Robinson is at it again, having just published a new book of essays entitled When I Was A Child I Read Books. Before I write some commentary directly about the book (which I am still finishing), I thought I would describe my encounter with her back in October of 2011 when she came to Utah for the Utah Humanities Council Book Festival. This was not the first time we had met, but it was for me unprecedented access to her. Part of this included a public interview with her in Salt Lake. You can find a link to the interview here: http://www.utahhumanities.org/BookFestival.htm. And you can read about her career here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilynne_Robinson.

If you are familiar with and admire her fiction, then you will not be surprised to hear that she is an extraordinarily thoughtful person. She is ready with a well crafted sentence, expressing her observations of the world with precision and grace. She is always gentle with her subjects and never seems to venture into slanderous dismissal of anyone. At the same time, she is not one to suffer fools gladly, which you will know if you are familiar with her sometimes fiery prose, but the fools she does not suffer are those of great pretense and influence in our society who make their living promulgating ignorance in the guise of being worldly-wise. Her piercing criticism is of ideas and lazy recycled thinking and feels less ad-hominem even if it is also at times tinged with sulphuric ire. Otherwise, she speaks softly, deftly, with reverence. But there is something mischievous too about her voice. She catches herself laughing at what she is saying so frequently that her voice almost seems to sing, moving along with a kind of lilt and skip. She laughs at herself and at the follies of others, not out of mockery, but almost as if laughter were the most appropriate way of registering the dignity of human experience. Humor seems important enough to her that when it is lacking in others, she almost seems dismayed. Hearing the laughter in her voice, you become aware of how much humor you may have missed in her fiction.

Her essays, on the other hand, are relentlessly morally serious, so much so that you almost feel as if it drains you just to sustain the attention they require as they move from one sentence to another. It is their beauty and their sheer potency of argument that propel the reader forward, and once you obtain the almost Buddhist-like focus that is needed to read her, you feel yourself enter into a world that is refreshingly rational and feel dismayed that such moral clarity and reasonableness should feel so utterly new. What is it, you ask yourself, in your education and your upbringing that failed so miserably in conveying such vital ideas? She is fond of saying that we are wrong about so much that we must come to expect that we are always misguided, as if thinking aright requires perpetually turning over the soils of accepted wisdom in order to help fertilize new insight. She goes so far as to suggest that this is the very model of the religious life—a life dedicated to rereading and rethinking, questioning what we thought we knew. While character reigns supreme in her hierarchy of values, you begin to suspect that a Christian’s character is as much shaped by action as it is by quality of thought. What is especially reassuring is that her own role as a lion’s voice in the debates about science and religion, the centrality of the humanities, and the dignity of the human condition seem evidence enough that self-scrutiny need not be debilitating to the clear formation and passionate expression of opinion.

It might have been my own fantasy, but she seemed rather enamored with Utah. I think she found common cause with a community that thrived at the intersection of serious religious commitment to service and commitment to learning. She feels a certain solidarity with the West, with the way in which the accomplishments of civilization—a public library, the seat of state government, or a church—can stand out against the outsize elements of open sky, towering mountains, and extensive vistas. She is, of course, well aware of the dangers posed by religious zealots, but she seems especially comfortable in a setting where the language of religion can be used openly and the merits of religious values can be debated in earnest. And she appreciates the Mormon sense of history that informs everyday life here. She was not so naïve as to imagine that we Utahns are having no troubles in rising to the challenges of building just and equitable communities in the middle of a hotbed of a sometimes callous conservatism and a reactionary and almost equally dogmatic secularism, but there was something about the distance of the place, its unique history, and its extraordinary beauty that reminded her of her own roots in upper-state Idaho and gave her reason for hope. And something too in the way people here flocked to hear her, laughing and nodding in recognition while listening transfixed to passages of her mesmerizing prose that she read aloud. People here identify strongly with the world she paints of intimate and tender feelings for life’s mystery and grandeur as well as of the awe and fortitude required in the face of life’s steep challenges.

I think she was particularly taken by the students she met at BYU. They struck her as earnest, studying with a shared purpose, bright-eyed, and intelligent beyond their years. During a question and answer session with aspiring young writers at BYU, she did, however, chide them for assuming that unless they could learn to keep their religious disposition under wraps it might somehow put them at a disadvantage as writers or as intellectuals. Instead, she urged them to be excellent and fully themselves, to trust in the gifts of language and reason born of appreciation for beauty in human experience. There is almost nothing that can’t be accomplished in writing, she insisted, with the right words, the right tone, the right notes.

I took her on a walk around Cecret Lake near Alta, along with my daughter Eliza and an old high school friend of Robinson’s who now lives in Orem. It was a nippy October day and there were still patches of yellowed aspen on the mountainsides. We walked slowly around the boardwalk and the pathway that encircles the small body of water at the foot of the surrounding mountains. I told her, with an attempt at ribbing humor, that her novel Housekeeping had ruined mountain lakes for me. She asked why. “The taste of human blood and hair,” I said, echoing a line from the novel that describes the lake of Fingerbone, years after a train wreck had buried bodies deep in its dark waters. Human history is everywhere now, even in the high reaches of the mountains, I explained. She laughed. And somehow she made the idea seem reassuring, maybe even holy.