Hunger and Never-Ending Experiments

I followed a trail of comments today to find a link to an article written by Fr. Stephen Freeman last year. I don’t remember reading this article then, though I certainly was an active reader at the time. Maybe I missed it or maybe it didn’t have the same impact. Now, having been through a few cycles of Covid-related impositions, their sort-of withdrawal, the war in Ukraine (ongoing), and another year of trying to hold together my little communities: work, home and dance, these words have a profound impact, a sense of articulating thoughts and intuitions powerfully. What do I do with this knowledge and insight?

When America Got Sick

A quote:

The difficulty with engineered religions, or causes that serve as substitutes, is that they fail to transcend. Regardless of how great many moments or ideas might be, they easily die a thousand deaths as their many non-transcendent failures come to mind. In the late 1960’s, the singer Peggy Lee registered a hit single, “Is that all there is?” It is a song with the lilt of a French chanson, à la Edith Piaf. It moves through the great moments of life, including love and even death itself, but offers its sad refrain:

Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

This is our context, the world of modernity. It is also our sickness, an empty lassitude whose hunger invites never-ending experiments of conferring meaning on our world. The “better world” that modernity pursues shifts relentlessly and changes as though it were directed by Paris fashionistas. At the same time, it is met with increasing anger and frustration, a predictable response to what are essentially imposed religious views.

Mere mortals dancing

I found this recent post on Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog quite gripping:

“Make it so!” vs “Let it be!”

The themes are ones I’ve discussed before, in my own mind and with others. What is truth; to what extent do we control reality; should we be fixated on who does  and who doesn’t have power. More importantly, what sort of power is really worth having and is that the right word for it.

“The truth” is that which is real, that which truly exists. It is the case that some things have more existence than others. Our own existence is tenuous and ephemeral. We seek that which truly exists that we might, through it, have true existence ourselves. We cannot grant existence to ourselves – it comes as a gift from the only truly Existing One.

Recognizing our existence as tenuous and ephemeral is one thing that might lead us to see the value of tradition. Tradition has, from one perspective, attracted me for a long time. The earliest I can remember being consciously aware of this was in my late teens/early 20s, when I participated on a listserv discussion about Cape Breton Celtic music. (Ah, the good old days of the frontier internet.)

Celtic music was enjoying a bit of a popular revival at the time, with appealing, youthful musicians blending traditional instruments, melodies and themes with contemporary ones. All of it was wholesome, truly: you’d have to stretch to find anything subversive or disturbing in it. Nevertheless, on this listserv I first encountered openly the tension between innovation and tradition. It was the first time I met people who unapologetically argued that traditional forms have more value in the long term than popular innovations. This was quite shocking to me, at first. Somehow, all my education, if not my own experience, had reinforced the message that tradition was something you break away from. It had not occurred to me that there was another side to the story, and that kind and intelligent people might believe in it.

The conversation on that listserv was mostly convivial however, and everyone that I recall was friendly and more than willing to talk with willing listeners. Starting with these discussions, I discovered a way to resolve the tension, at least in the realm of the arts. Tradition is a way of preserving something valuable through community. It allows creative people to encounter something meaningful, giving them a direction and a discipline. Truly innovative people should not be discouraged from experimenting (though it doesn’t hurt them to be challenged, either.). But neither is it possible for everyone, or even most, to be innovative geniuses. A healthy tradition will create a few, but they will never be the majority. However, anybody can participate in the tradition: learning it, supporting it,  passing it on to the best of their ability. This participation is just as meaningful in real life as innovation, most of the time. It’s much more meaningful than being part of nothing, that’s for sure.

Once I had articulated this insight, I found a lot of my anxiety about (not) being special, or noticed, or uniquely talented or (yikes!) famous melting away. I could actually enjoy my own creativity more because I wasn’t over-analyzing it. The realization that I could be part, even in a small way, of a tradition that embraced multiple generations, geographies, countries and cultures was amazing. I could be fully myself and more than myself at the same time.

An experience in Scotland when I was 26 catalyzed this idea for me. I was attending a week long music festival, learning step dancing. From my account of that time:

Toward the end of the week, our dance teacher, Frank, went over all the [dance] steps we had learned. Then he solemnly told us to "stop thinking." We aren't just dancing to the music. We aren't just responding to it. We must get right inside it. And to do that, he said, we can't be worrying about what we are doing. Otherwise we are focused on ourselves, and not on the music.

High on endorphins, I wished he would stop making pretty speeches and let us start dancing. But he continued:

"If you relax and let the dance into you, it will teach you. Because I believe music and dancing are much more powerful than mere mortals.

Frank was saying something very similar, if not the same, as Fr. Freeman above. Reality is not something you create. It is discovered, encountered, as a gift.

Frank’s words have stuck with me, as I have continued to dance, write, play music and eventually to teach. I am lucky to sometimes have chances to perform for an audience. Of course this always causes some nervousness. It’s also easy (sadly) to become hyper critical of yourself. After many performances, dancers often start talking obsessively about all the mistakes we made, although these are rarely obvious to those watching and nobody will remember them anyway. It is all self consciousness. But I have found that I can ease the anxiety by remembering Frank’s words. I frame the performance in my mind as an opportunity to share something beautiful I have been given. Dancing with me are unseen generations of people who have transcended time, space and mortality to give me this gift and opportunity. The nerves are there, but I am filled with joy and excitement and I do not have to force a smile for the audience. And if I have practiced and I stay in the moment, I also make fewer mistakes (but regardless, I am part of a long line of people who have made mistakes and danced on).

So that is one side of the story: the attraction to tradition. There is another one too. But this entry has become longer than I expected, so I think I will engage that topic separately. (I do not necessarily know what direction these blog entries will take and often end up writing about something quite different than I originally intended.)

Choice, good and evil

“Choice” is something we are taught is central in our lives from an early age. Good choices, bad choices. I use this language with my children and students. How could I not? If you value freedom, you value choice. That’s how we think.

At the same time, for many years I’ve found this emphasis on choice a little bit....insufficient, I suppose. While a good many things are influenced by choice, a lot of important things aren’t, at least not by my choices. I suppose you could say that we are influenced by each other’s choices, and that would be more true.  The larger group of humanity making good choices influences my life for the better. But then what is this “good” we are striving toward, and how do we know it?  How can any of my fellow humans know their choices are impacting me? For that matter, why should we strive toward good in the first place?

For the past year or so I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog.  He writes about different issues from an orthodox theological perspective, and I enjoy it because it’s very different from any other perspective I get from anybody. He recently wrote a blog about choice and whether 

evil is necessary for the existence of good.  I really enjoyed it and the very intelligent discussion in the 100+ comments. 

Food for thought:

Before looking at the nature of good and evil, it is worth seeing the problem involved when choice is inserted into the conversation. What happens in that approach is that we are no longer speaking about the nature of good and evil, indeed, both are relativized in importance. Everything quickly revolves back to the nature of choosing, and makes the actions of our will the center of the good. Thus, there is no true good or evil, only good choices and evil choices. It is a narcissistic ontology – a system of thought in which we ourselves become the center of attention.

Indeed, it is a bit terrifying to think there is no good outside of my choices. What if I am too ignorant to make good choices? What if I don’t feel like it? What if all the choices are simply terrible, which they might be because of bad luck or because I have made so many awful choices already that I am not left with any good ones?

Fr. Freeman goes on to describe (intriguingly I think) the human condition as one of change, or kinesis. He explains thus:

...Evil is not a “thing,” nor something that has any existence or being at all. To think about evil, it is necessary to understand that all of creation (ourselves included) is in motion (kenesis). Everything moves and changes (in terms of being). The proper movement for all things is towards its end in God (its telos). This is a movement towards greater truth, beauty, and goodness. Evil, on the other hand, is a movement away from proper being, a movement away from truth, beauty, and goodness. However, it is crucial to note that this is a movement, and not a thing.

If I understand correctly, this is related to something I intuited quite a while ago: each choice I make, however freely made, changes me in some way.  The “me” that makes each good or bad choice is not static. Maybe one choice doesn’t move me a whole lot in one direction or another. But 5, 10, 20 choices down the line, the “me” doing the choosing is potentially quite a different me from the me who made the first choices. And that me is going to perceive and experience reality quite differently.

I find this aspect of choice is not really brought up in everyday discussion of choice, which tends to focus on relationships and material things: poor choices make others angry, or waste you time and resources, or lose you opportunities. All this is true enough, but I’m not sure it’s sufficiently subtle for cases where there is no immediate bad result from a choice, or it takes too much imagination to think that far into the future. Beyond the material consequences, I think we all need to have some sort of understanding of what our choices are moving us toward. Individual choices don’t make us a good or evil person on their own. But I do think it is possible to get to a place where it becomes difficult to choose not to do evil. And that is really quite terrifying.