A Splendid Virtue

 a splendid virtue called disobedience”  

(Oriana Fallaci, from Letter to a Child Never Born)

actually, within its circumference, I might have chosen

noble, for that’s what it takes to bear its necessity, alone,

and never so much as in that instance, no decision, just a tic,

thoughtless, of course, but mattering so much more, a flash of 

lightning striking, an energy of the cosmos marking deliverance.

placidly, in countervailing compensation, hope, like the child’s wistful

wishing, wide-eyed from under covers, silently thinking and not

speaking, reaches out into the stillness, and fades to pale yellow…and so

in each crucible of determination, like a bee hunting a hive spot,

difference hovers, “against the wisdom and certitude of ages and sages."

What is there in obeisant allegiance?  filling orders, timing out the day in 

an overseer’s drum beat, shining boots with your tongue, or hoping perhaps

somewhere the lightning will strike and wake us to be human.

For not to obey is to show the palm in the face of acceptance and calm.

It is not being nice and smiley-faced as bile surges into your mouth.

It is disrespect in the face of demeaning, shameless, mindless authority.

It is, perhaps, the most profound and useful virtue available to you.

 

Sustaining

 

To abstain,

To obtain, 

To sustain;

That, dear Prince ,

Is the answer…

The question doesn’t matter,

And it will drive you 

(and yours) crazy.

Questioning ends

In gross self-pity

(as though, as you know, 

there 

were another kind)

And warps the mind

No matter the good 

or Noble intentions.

But the curse

(in all this)

is the sustaining

(you know, where you

Find yourself) wandering

(as we see).

Yes,

Indeed,

Sustain is the crux,

And, of course, yes

The course, that 

must begin

With the others, 

What our new wise men

(very unlike Uncle P)

call foundational.

Thus, Sustaining is much

More difficult,

Despite TS  and

His 

(this, the dead land,

the cactus land, really?)

maundering,

Than Princing.

And so

Here we are,

Definitely not Princing

And, perhaps, glad of it.

The Dirt

First he thought it was the dirt.  All kinds of dirt.  The powdery dust in the worn out middle of the playground was first.  It would collect in the corners of his eyes and cling to his teeth. It got thick enough to feel with his tongue, and then he'd scrub it with his finger.  

It gets in your nose.  You know it's there because you're breathing hard through your mouth, because the caked dust in your nose forces you to do that.  Then you blow it out and it's this kind of gooey black mud in the palm of your hand. And you don't have time to think about it.  Not until now anyway.  You could play for hours then on the playground.  They'd start as touch, but then it would be tackle.  Nothing but shirts, pants, skin and bone.  The playground Saturdays and Sundays.  You never had a ball but someone did.  Someone always did.  It was usually Cheese.  He was small by comparison.  But his dad made sure he had a ball.  Then he'd be able to play.  He was older than most of them and too small to play with the older guys.  But Ralph was younger and bigger.  He always played, but he never got to touch the ball.  He blocked and tackled.  Always in the middle of the dust cloud.  He didn’t really think about touching the ball.  He was there for the banging.

No first downs.  Four plays to go the distance.  Right field to the third baseline, the goal line.  That was the deal.  They came up to the playground by themselves.  Like people showing up for something important.  Those Saturday or Sunday mornings all came before the days when the weekends got clogged with more games on TV from all over the country that no one cares about anyway.  Breakfast, sometimes a little church sprinkled in, especially for the Catholics.  Ralph could never understand that one.  Church was usually optional for him, especially after the Sunday school years.  Something about his father's perfect record of non-attendance justified that.  Ralph could walk to the playground in about ten minutes.  So could his father, but his father never walked there with Ralph.  He stayed home and did something.  Usually something that had little to do with Ralph.  So the playground and its dust became another kind of lone-hood for Ralph.  The other kids seemed to like talking about each other and what went on the other day or at school.  Sometimes girls seeped into the conversations.  But Ralph was eager to get on with choosing sides and getting player positions straightened out.  

He was about two steps slower than he needed to be to get his hands on the ball.  He only cared at these times, choosing sides and setting player positions.  At first he hoped a little.  But that faded.  Once he understood how to become especially good at what his player position required, he perfected it like nobody else on the playground could.   Even the older guys.   He learned eventually, after taking some very hard hits, especially the blind-sided hits, that physical force is less about strength than it is about speed and leverage.  He didn’t need to study the physics of it either.  He felt it and learned to use it.  He could turn and hurt much bigger and stronger players by carefully executing these lessons. 

Faith?

 Over my years I’ve thought a great deal about faith and have talked about it with scholars and religious people.  I think I began thinking seriously about it as an adolescent, just about the same time I stopped going to the Presbyterian church of my Sunday school years.  As someone who studied and taught about literature, culture and media, I think I considered the subject of faith from its major angles. I think Aquinas and Thomas believed that faith was everywhere, like the air we breathe. They believed that to attempt to discover the meaning or nature of faith is a fool’s quest (and perhaps a sin), because faith is what living a life is. To lose faith is to lose your life, or as Sartre would say, your sense of being. Faith is the joy we feel when the best things happen; it is the relief we feel when we think the worst things have happened but are not as bad as we thought they would be.

Once about 15 years ago I wrote something for myself about the sources of faith (not in the major religions) that are difficult to avoid. I’ve concluded generally that the notion of faith (finding it, doubting it, losing it, regaining it) is really, as they say these days, a process. I think we can’t escape faith, because, as “homo sapiens,” we are all looking for (hoping for) certainty. Faith allows for the possibility of certainty, even though our life experiences may cause doubts about certainty. In my early life, I believed in possibility. That’s why I left a phenomenal teaching job in a phenomenal high school in Chagrin Falls, Ohio to get hired as an assistant professor at a college in New Haven, CT and enrolled in a PhD program at NYU. I learned quickly about the difference between possibility and probability. Lots of life stuff chiseled at my faith in certainty from then until now.  I didn’t get the PhD, but even without it I managed to become chairperson of two different academic departments and represented the college to overseas joint programs and even taught a course in rap and hip hop at the college level.

And even after retirement, after carrying the scars of diminished faith, I managed to try out possibility.  Having no knowledge of managing the forces of moving water, I decided I could build a dam with a spillover and manage the stream in my backyard to create a pond. In the end, my pond was good enough to attract a series of mating mallard ducks and once a giant blue heron.  Everything remained possible about the pond, until I became weaker and lacked the energy (which is considerable) to sustain the pond.

So I guess I can answer the question by saying, “No, I have not doubted faith…at least as I have experienced it.”  I have a book in my library “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels that discusses faith outside organized religion.  She basis the discussion on the words attributed to the apostle Thomas (as in doubting).  Thomas’ life pursued the questions of acquiring faith and understanding that you have it. He concluded, with some uncertainty, that we humans simply have it. And we therefore can’t acquire it. It is in our natures, in our lives as we live them. The Judeo-Christian belief is that it comes from The Word, which is what created everything (“First there was the Word…”).  That belief was Thomas’ starting point, which, during his quest, became unsatisfactory. Hence, doubting Thomas.  

Pagels points out that in the Thomas perspective claiming to be an ardent believer is not evidence that you have faith.  In a discussion I once had with a former seminarian about the language of organized religion we discovered something interesting:  The word “believe” has predicate usage (i.e., things happen through it), but the word “faith” has only nominal meaning (i.e., nothing happens through it; it simply is), and this led to a discussion of the meaning of “is”, after which we decided it has no meaning without its complement. In the context of the current discussion, faith as a nominal has humans as its complement.

So hang in there everyone…and keep your faith.