Interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual
I Corinthians 2:13
Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn.
Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”
My first memory of a Bob Dylan song came from a Young Life group meeting I attended in high school. There was this song book that included “secular” songs along with explicitly Christian songs. I remember singing, “I Shall Be Released.” I also recall a locally produced Christian newspaper, put out by the Jesus people group I was part of at the time. One article making a case for Christian faith cited Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” – No reason to get excited, the thief he kindly spoke. There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us not talk softly now. The hour is getting late.
When I began to ask questions about the Christian faith as I knew it then, one place I looked to expand my mind was to the music of Bob Dylan. Those song lyrics that I had heard or sung spoke to me. What more might I learn? I remember buying my first Dylan albums - Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits, Volume 2. There they were: All Along the Watchtower, I Shall Be Released - - - and a whole lot more: the biting lyrics of “Positively Fourth Street,” the tender lyrics of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” the ache of “Just Like a Woman” and “I Want You,” and the phenomenal “Like a Rolling Stone.” How does it feel? It felt pretty amazing. Remarkably, this guy was born in Duluth (like I was) and grew up in Hibbing, the north country. I wanted to know more, and hear more. My school library had a copy of Writings and Drawings of Bob Dylan and Anthony Scaduto’s biography. As I could, I bought albums (vinyl then!). Street Legal was the first new Dylan album I bought when it came out and I have bought each new album in turn, even the Christmas album (I am glad proceeds went to charity).
Dylan’s music, with roots deep in a variety of American popular musical idioms, and his sometimes brilliant lyrics, were sparks igniting intellectual flames in my young mind. This was one cornerstone in the growth of the horizon of my self-understanding and my understanding of the world. There were others along the way – the psychology of Abraham Maslow, the thought of Alan Watts introducing me to non-Christian religious tradition, Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg’s Howl. I’ve not been quite the same since.
My journey brought me back to Christian faith, but it was a faith that could be more open to the world - that could listen to rock, jazz and Dylan, that could think with and about other religious traditions, that could be in dialogue with psychology and philosophy. Dylan’s music has been a part my journey for many years now. I am currently reading Robert Stolorow World, Affectivity and Trauma, subtitled “Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis”. I came to the chapter titled, “Our Kinship-In-Finitude” in which Stolorow argues the importance of persons connecting with each other in our common experience of finitude. We seek out “brothers and sisters in the dark night” and such connection (“deep emotional attunement’) is especially important if we are to be able to integrate our traumatic experiences into our lives. The essay begins with an epigraph from…. Bob Dylan. I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.
This week Bob Dylan turned 70. This summer I turn 52. I am grateful that our days have overlapped and grateful for this music which is part of the soundtrack of my life, these words which are part of the poetry of my life.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Friday, May 27, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Kierkegaard parable
It has been more challenging in recent weeks to find time to blog. Since Easter I have traveled out of state twice, officiated at two (with tomorrow – three) funerals, and been busy with all kinds of May activities.
Bradlee Dean’s prayer before the Minnesota legislature today could give me something to write about, but I want more time to consider how one might best respond. I appreciated the Republican Speaker of the House’s response. Mother Jones on-line has a piece about the connection between Dean and Representative Michele Bachmann, but I don’t have time to develop all this right now.
I hope, in the near future to develop some thoughts about the hatred of taxes “theology” that is prominent right now in many places (phrase from Michael Tomasky in The New York Review of Books), in light of a book recently completed and one in which I am significantly immersed – Cowen, The Great Stagnation (available only as an e-book) and Hacker, The Great Risk Shift. Again, I need more time for this.
Next week, Bob Dylan turns 70. There has to be something there.
This past week, Harmon Killebrew died.
A lot of tiny threads, but little whole cloth.
So here for your reflection is a parable written by Soren Kierkegaard (from Concluding Unscientific Postscript and found in Parables of Kierkegaard)
When in a written examination the youth are allotted four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon: then his celerity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Bradlee Dean’s prayer before the Minnesota legislature today could give me something to write about, but I want more time to consider how one might best respond. I appreciated the Republican Speaker of the House’s response. Mother Jones on-line has a piece about the connection between Dean and Representative Michele Bachmann, but I don’t have time to develop all this right now.
I hope, in the near future to develop some thoughts about the hatred of taxes “theology” that is prominent right now in many places (phrase from Michael Tomasky in The New York Review of Books), in light of a book recently completed and one in which I am significantly immersed – Cowen, The Great Stagnation (available only as an e-book) and Hacker, The Great Risk Shift. Again, I need more time for this.
Next week, Bob Dylan turns 70. There has to be something there.
This past week, Harmon Killebrew died.
A lot of tiny threads, but little whole cloth.
So here for your reflection is a parable written by Soren Kierkegaard (from Concluding Unscientific Postscript and found in Parables of Kierkegaard)
When in a written examination the youth are allotted four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon: then his celerity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Kristeva
In college I majored in philosophy and psychology, and thirty years later the question – “what are you going to do with that?” still echoes.
To be a philosophy major is to have encountered, now and again, some piece of writing that is a challenge to decipher, but nevertheless leaves you feeling that there is more there to be grappled with. Perhaps what I have done with my philosophy major is to search out, now and again, difficult and challenging writings that nevertheless speaks to me and stretches me, even if through a fog, a cloud, a mist.
Julia Kristeva and I share a birthday, eighteen years apart. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst whose writings transcend various academic disciplines. To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work…. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics love. (Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, vi)
This is my kind of stuff, so when I came across her book This Incredible Need to Believe, I wanted to read it – and a recent airline trip made that possible. The book consists of essays and interviews on religious themes which have engaged Kristeva for a long time. Her perspective is unique: a woman who is not a believer – a psychoanalyst, teacher, writer – convinced nonetheless that the “genius of Christianity” has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations as concerns the religious experience of speaking beings (88). Her appreciation for Christian faith runs deep. Christianity opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration and literature: to the inner experience that goes from the quest for convulsive communion to the necessity I feel of questioning everything – from the abysses of childhood up to the unknown (viii). The history of Christianity is a preparation for humanism (83). She sees possibilities for helpful “complicities” between “Christianity and the vision of human complexity to which I am attached” (78)
I don’t claim to have grasped everything that Kristeva wants to say, but I appreciated the scattered insights gained as I struggled with this challenging work. I share a few with you.
The psychic life of the speaking beings that we are is the result of a long “working out of the negative”: birth, separation, frustration, various kinds of lack – so many kinds of suffering (79). Each and every one of us is the result of a long “work on the negative”: birth, weaning, separation, frustration (94).
The only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do…. Still, when new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around and in us: when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face with extravagant accumulations of wealthy, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give itself the means to interpret and reinvent this “loving intelligence” that comes and is inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused with the divine itself. (97-98)
Freedom means having the courage to start over (44).
My conversation with Julia Kristeva is not over.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
To be a philosophy major is to have encountered, now and again, some piece of writing that is a challenge to decipher, but nevertheless leaves you feeling that there is more there to be grappled with. Perhaps what I have done with my philosophy major is to search out, now and again, difficult and challenging writings that nevertheless speaks to me and stretches me, even if through a fog, a cloud, a mist.
Julia Kristeva and I share a birthday, eighteen years apart. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst whose writings transcend various academic disciplines. To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work…. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics love. (Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, vi)
This is my kind of stuff, so when I came across her book This Incredible Need to Believe, I wanted to read it – and a recent airline trip made that possible. The book consists of essays and interviews on religious themes which have engaged Kristeva for a long time. Her perspective is unique: a woman who is not a believer – a psychoanalyst, teacher, writer – convinced nonetheless that the “genius of Christianity” has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations as concerns the religious experience of speaking beings (88). Her appreciation for Christian faith runs deep. Christianity opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration and literature: to the inner experience that goes from the quest for convulsive communion to the necessity I feel of questioning everything – from the abysses of childhood up to the unknown (viii). The history of Christianity is a preparation for humanism (83). She sees possibilities for helpful “complicities” between “Christianity and the vision of human complexity to which I am attached” (78)
I don’t claim to have grasped everything that Kristeva wants to say, but I appreciated the scattered insights gained as I struggled with this challenging work. I share a few with you.
The psychic life of the speaking beings that we are is the result of a long “working out of the negative”: birth, separation, frustration, various kinds of lack – so many kinds of suffering (79). Each and every one of us is the result of a long “work on the negative”: birth, weaning, separation, frustration (94).
The only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do…. Still, when new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around and in us: when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face with extravagant accumulations of wealthy, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give itself the means to interpret and reinvent this “loving intelligence” that comes and is inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused with the divine itself. (97-98)
Freedom means having the courage to start over (44).
My conversation with Julia Kristeva is not over.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
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