Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Full Aliveness in Deadly Times

Nichola Torbett, Network of Spiritual Progressives
September 28, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

I want to begin this morning with a poem that many of you will know. It’s called “God’s Grandeur,” and it was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins wrote this poem during the industrial revolution, as a time when one way of life was giving way to another.

I think I am moved to share it with you this morning because we stand at another such precipice, and one at which Hopkins imagery of creation smudged by human self-interest resonates. After years of feeding the globalization of materialism and greed, we may be facing the collapse of the U.S. financial system, and millions stand to lose their jobs, their homes, or both. We know that the economic collapse is not unrelated to our reliance on foreign oil, which is not unrelated to the now 600 billion dollar war in Iraq or to the natural disasters of the last several years, nor to the mass species extinctions we are now facing. Experts tell us we may have ten years of potable drinking water left, and that is being rapidly privatized — bottled and sold back to us in containers that will never biodegrade. The lack of affordable clean drinking water contributes to health crises and poverty around the world, breeding misery and creating conditions ripe for the recruitment of terrorists. Meanwhile, here at home, youth from low-income families turn to the drug trade and gang activity, feeding the prison-industrial complex that generates income for the increasingly privatized incarceration industry while devastating whole communities and furthering the cycle of desperation and violence.

I no longer believe that we can address any of these issues in isolation, competing with each other for time, energy, funding, and media attention while we ignore the ways that these issues form the warp and woof of an interconnected empire system. By empire system, I mean a system that extracts resources from the majority of the population for the extremely disproportionate benefit of a few people at the very top. We must address the root causes of the globalization of selfishness, materialism, greed, and domination, and that means addressing the spiritual sickness that keeps us locked in a way of life that is ultimately suicidal. If you have tried to do any organizing or mobilizing of the American people lately, you know what I mean by spiritual sickness. Organizing efforts are greeted, at best, with lethargy, and those of us who consider ourselves activists are not exempt from this malaise. We are not only surrounded by the walking dead but are suffering from deadness ourselves. Cynicism, despair and hopelessness have us hemmed in by deadness on every side.

And yet, as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “there is the dearest freshness deep down things.” In other words, life is always trying to rupture into death. Hope is always trying to spring up, and that is where full aliveness comes in. By full aliveness I mean the “audacious hope” that has been the subject of many speeches in the past year. I mean the Spirit of life that we can cultivate within ourselves that has the power to rupture into systems of deathliness. I mean an awakening to the awesome sacredness of all life and to our own profound and unseverable connection to all that is. From this consciousness, fully experienced, comes a willingness to lay down our lives for what we love, and a contagious ability to inspire others to do the same, and that is what it’s going to take, at this point, to turn things around. We are going to have to lay down anything and everything that does not serve the flourishing of life. What keeps us from this state of full aliveness, and how can we get there from here?

I’d like to approach this question by telling a story, the story of Medusa, the destructive snake-haired witch of Greek mythology, who turned all those who looked upon her to stone. This paralysis that people experienced when they came into contact with Medusa is, I think, a useful metaphor for the lethargy, the inner deadness, that many of us feel in the face of global crises.

What many people don’t know about Medusa is that she was once a beautiful, passionate woman, until she made the mistake of offending the powerful goddess Athena.

Now, Athena was a goddess of war, and the myth has it that she was born from her father’s forehead, fully armed. Athena is one of those women we might describe as “very well defended.” She keeps her emotions and passions carefully tucked away so that they don’t interfere with her rigorous pursuit of excellence on the battlefield. She is not someone you want to cross.

Medusa was a significant threat to Athena because she represented all that Athena was not — earthy, emotional, passionate, extremely desirable as a lover. Medusa embodied all that Athena would not allow herself to be, all of the passions that Athena kept under tight control because they would have distracted her from her efforts to dominate through force and intellectual prowess. (Remember that Athena was born of her father’s forehead and thus represented a reliance on the intellect for power.)

When the passionate Medusa dared to have sex in Athena’s temple, defiling the holy ground of the powerful goddess, Athena retaliated by turning Medusa into a hideous creature with writhing snakes for hair and a face so terrible that anyone who dared to look at her was turned to stone.

In this state, cut off from all human contact, shut up in a cave much of the time, Medusa developed outrageous cravings that could not be satisfied. In her efforts to assuage her hunger, she wrecked all kinds of havoc on Greece. For a long time, no one could stop her because anyone who tried was turned to stone.

I am drawn to the feud between Athena and Medusa because I see their contrasting energies at war in our culture today and contributing in a significant way to the interrelated global crises in which we find ourselves. In the splitting between the two, I think we find some clues to the obstacles to what I am calling full aliveness.

The heady, ruthless drive of Athena is quite common in our culture. Athena energy drives us toward progress, perfection, and victory at all costs. Hers is an emotionless, technocraticallly warlike consciousness that evinces a deep distrust of passion, emotion, earthiness, inner life, and what Carl Jung called “the feminine.” (Remember that Athena is not of woman born). Athena is driven toward a godlike ideal of unrestricted progress, domination, and control that rejects everything that doesn’t fit that ideal and projects it onto an evil, defiled “other.” In the myth, she projects those qualities onto Medusa, creating a monster comprised of all that she cannot countenance in herself.

Just as the outwardly-focused driven energy of Athena is common in our society, so are the insatiable and destructive cravings of her evil twin, the monster Medusa, who is everywhere evident in our addictive society — with her yearning for food and drink and cheap sex and stuff and activity and more and more and more. Even those of us who are working for change have those places where we remain enslaved to substances or practices that support the empire. Many of us are dimly cognizant that we are seeking in those substances or practices some compensation for a deep rejection, for having been in some way exiled from what we most long for. We are seeking in alcohol a more transcendent kind of spirit, in the muffin a different kind of sweetness. In the myth, Medusa and Athena are two sides of one coin, only they’ve been cut off from each other in a way that leaves one rigid and unfeeling and the other an insatiable monster. You are familiar with this split if you are a high-performer at work, able to perform perfectly every task that comes your way, but when you come home at night, you are consumed with emptiness and find yourself eating a dozen donuts for dinner. Often the further we go into Athena consciousness in the daylight, the more secret destructive Medusa energy develops in the unconscious.

On a societal scale, this relentless addiction to consumption is pillaging the natural world, feeding an impending environmental crisis, and forcing us into an adversarial relationship with the rest of the world in which we must fight for our “right” to consume wildly disproportionate quantities of the world’s resources.

Familiar in our culture, too, is the paralysis, the turned-to-stoneness, that comes in Medusa’s wake, which is the unconsciousness that follows on the heels of any addiction — the alcoholic who passes out at the end of the evening, the binger who, when the sugar high subsides, falls into a carbohydrate stupor, the shop-til-you-dropper who shops and then drops. This is why trying to rally the public to a social change agenda feels like swimming through corn syrup. Because we are!

Something in us, though, yearns for life. Like the heroes who attempt to kill the murderous Medusa, many of us have tried to confront our addictions head-on, and you know what happens when you do that. What happens when 5 o’clock rolls around, and your inner Medusa says, “Okay, time for a cocktail,” and you say “No, not this time,” or when 3 o’clock comes and she says “Get me my chocolate,” and you try to say “no.” Hell hath no fury like an addiction scorned. Our urgent efforts to halt the destruction of the planet and of each other often encounter a similar resistance among mainstream Americans who sense that their right to addictive consumption is about to be curtailed. Just as Medusa could not be stopped by confronting her directly, our addictions — personal or cultural — cannot usually be halted by direct confrontation. This is what people mean when they say that no one will give up their privilege voluntarily. I don’t agree with that, actually — more on that later — but it is true that if the sacrifice is demanded with force, people are unlikely to yield it.

It may be instructive to look at how Medusa was finally stopped to see what we can learn about halting the runaway addictive energy in ourselves and in our culture. Medusa was finally killed by a hero named Perseus, who was able to slay the witch by using a mirrored shield to avoid looking directly at her. He approached her not directly but through reflection.

In her remarkable work on addiction, Marian Woodman equates this reflection in the mirrored shield with self-reflection done through meditation, journaling, painting, dancing. Through this kind of inner work, working with the feelings that come up as one faces the cravings of an addiction, one is able to hold the tension without giving in to the addictive substance. In that moment, according to Woodman, one can integrate rejected parts of the self and realize what one is really craving, which may be not alcohol but real spirit, not sugar but the sweetness of real loving connection, not more work but more meaning.

Part of our work as social change agents, then, is to the do this kind of reflection ourselves. to uncover the habits, rigid belief systems, and entrenched identities that are standing in the way of true life. As we begin to come into full aliveness ourselves, we become beacons to others and can create contexts for other people to do this kind of reflection. We can facilitate a broad awakening, through reflection, to the fact that neither all of our frenetic working and doing — our Athena tendencies — nor our Medusa-esque cycles of consumption and unconsciousness are actually bringing us satisfaction. At that point, we are willing to relinquish our so-called “privilege,” because the truth is that relentless accumulation of material stuff with no meaning, at the cost of full aliveness, is not a privilege at all. One of the projects I’m working on right now, through the Seminary of the Street and Urban Sanctuaries, is the development of small neighborhood groups that can provide the containers for this kind of reflective work.

I also believe that real change is dependent on a new understanding of our interconnectedness that will enable us to overcome our sense of separateness and the projection that illusion of separateness invites. It is not possible to root out the value system of the empire in isolation, absent ties of love and affection. We need to form genuine communities in which we each commit to the wholeness and freedom of every member.

In order to form genuine community, we much become conscious of and actively resist our tendencies to create “others.” That’s why part of what interests me in the slaying of Medusa is what exactly Perseus sees in that mirrored shield. If it’s mirrored, he must actually see himself, not Medusa, or maybe himself and Medusa together, reintegrated. Interestingly, in some versions of the myth, the mirrored shield was given to Perseus by Athena herself, suggesting that when Perseus pointed it at Medusa, he enabled her to be reintegrated into Athena, from whom she had been split off through projection. Through this process, Athena, Medusa, and Perseus are all transformed. No one gets to stay as they are. Both Athena and Medusa have to go; they have to be transformed into something entirely new.

That means something does have to die. Medusa is killed in the story. We may be facing the truth that the systems by which we have been living, and the way of life they have enabled, are now in their death throes. It may not be possible, much less desirable, to bail them out for $700 billion dollars or a trillion dollars. If that’s the case, then let’s have the funeral. Let’s grieve the losses. And then let’s create something new.

Because death always opens up the possibility of new life. This is what happens when Perseus cuts off the head of the witch Medusa. From her severed neck emerge two beings--Pegasus, the winged horse of creativity, and Chrysaor, a giant carrying the golden sword of discernment. Through a process of transformation, creativity and discernment are released. Valuable qualities, these, for the healing and transformation of our world.

Returning now to the question with which I began: How can we come into full aliveness, individually and collectively?

First, full aliveness must start with an acknowledgement of our own brokenness, of all the ways that we have internalized the values of the domination system. We have all met the activist who is running on the energy of domination and control. Perhaps you’ve met the Athena activist who buries you in a pile of facts and statistics without a hint of personal connection. Or the activist who adheres to a strict code of political correctness, as if a rigid code can substitute for the more difficult and painful work of being present in love to another person who might be hurt by something you say and then striving to understand that person’s point of view. Athena activism is of limited effectiveness because it tries to confront Medusa face to face. So long as we are split internally between the intellectualized idealized drive of Athena and the insatiable materialism of Medusa, we are unable to come into full aliveness, and we continue to support, through our consumptive participation, the very systems we are trying to bring down.

Second, then, we have to do this reflective work, rooted in love, in which we confront our own split-off-ness, all of the ways we have internalized the domination system under which we live. Without that kind of reflection, we are fated to replicate the very problems we set out to solve — problems of authoritarianism, racism, sexism, othering, and top-down hierarchies — because they live in us.

Third, we need to engage deeply with others across lines of difference, forming deep alliances of solidarity in intercultural social-justice-making communities. In these relationships, if they are real and go deep, we can learn humility by discovering what we don’t know we don’t know. We also find out quickly which of our habits and ways of being inhibit the life of others, though they may serve us. If we are going to become fully alive, we will need to divest ourselves of our own privilege, whether that means giving away much of what we own, or changing “the way we’ve always done it,” or letting go of our own assumptions that we pretty much know how things are. In deep community across lines of difference, we learn to lay down our very lives for those we we love. Connected to this spirit, we access solidarity, or what Joanna Macy calls “power with” rather than “power over.” This is the fully alive power we need to disrupt and overturn the structures of domination and empire.

Finally, we need to give up our fantasies of the perfect social justice parent, the heroic leader who is going to save us all, and recognize that we really are the leaders we’ve been waiting for. Electing a “savior” in this presidential election is not going to save us. Hope is only audacious when it is your own hope, your own discipline that consists of taking the next right action.

So, we begin the process of confronting deathliness by confronting it in ourselves as we exist in community. As we begin to reintegrate the dead and cut off parts of ourselves — as we get in touch with our own longing and lust and fear and hunger for meaning and purpose and work to integrate those (without acting them out) — we will develop powerful empathy for other people when we see them struggling with those qualities. Gone will be the urge to project our own rejected qualities onto them. At that point, we will be able to do as the poet W. H. Auden suggests, to “love our crooked neighbor with our own crooked hearts.” And that is the beginning of life.

 

Reflection: Inner Deadness by Karl Garcia