puzzle pieces

(this probably won't make sense if you haven't read the previous two entries.)

Aristotle:

"Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.b. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."
--Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle believes we become good by acting good, over and over again, until we become habituated. I hated this idea in CC, but it makes more and more sense to me. I know that's how I become brave, is by braving things. And how I become more friendly, by befriending.

I'm convinced, in general, that the human brain is fantastic at precisely two things: learning behaviors (that is, connecting a behavioral pattern to a future reward) and abstracting behaviors (open box, get cookie -> buy a box of cookies, get cookie -> earn money, afford a box of cookies -> get a job, feel accomplished, etc. etc. etc.). That is, both behaviors and pay-offs get steadily more abstract as we build on the incredibly complicated patterns of behavior we've learned. And of course, at any sufficiently complicated degree of abstraction, the levels start crossing: eating a cookie makes us satisfied because it's sweet, but also because it reminds us of our childhood, and maybe because it makes us feel successful (if it's a particularly luxurious cookie). sometimes the pay-off reverses; i hug my parents because it makes me happy, i hug my parents because it makes them happy, their happiness makes me happy. all of this is way too simple. but at the very basic, it's Aristotle. if we can train ourselves in the simple things, in the basic strictures of our morality, we can exist as moral beings.

more: being good grows out of doing good. that's what i hear in the second part of the prayer of St. Francis. In his call to seek to console rather than to be consoled and to understand rather than to be understood, i hear a call to do good out of one's own brokenness.

right now, i hear in that prayer a call to dig out ruts of morality in one's life, so that at the very least, in the face of sadness, one can travel the same path one always does, by rote and blindly, until sight returns. Kaddish is at heart a book struggling with the idea of ritual in the face of skeptical about the ritual cosmology, and ultimately it seems to come to rest at least in part in the idea that ritual is a staging ground, a home for the mourner, an opportunity for understanding to grow out of repetition.

wieseltier at one point says that sadness is singlemindedness and that it is opposed to multiplicity and to engagement. st. francis's prayer calls us precisely to engagement with multiplicity. dumb chiasmus. what i mean is that in demanding that i be kind to others, it forces me out of my self-absorption for long enough to let me take a look back at my sadness as another piece of self-absorption.

and it works very deliberately right now. i pray it now, when i'm overcome with that egoistic sadness, and it prompts me to pull myself back into the world. i sink back out, into my sadness, and sometimes i pray it again. i startle, i get distracted. i get sad. i get angry, i get upset, i punch things. i may pray again.

but i hope with long commitment to make the prayer a practice, to see if i can live by a commitment to that wisdom. i'll still be angry and hurt, but maybe my first response will be to understand rather than demand understanding and to sow love rather than ruin my fields digging for it.

i don't feel the same way about repeated prayer in general. i've prayed too many times as an unbeliever to put much stock in it. what it does do, though, is keep your spiritual tools sharp, so that when you next have an opportunity to use them, you only have to remember how.

where the Divine comes into all of this, for me, is in letting me acknowledge what i perceive as my own worthlessness in order to celebrate myself and delight in others, and to bring forth solace or understanding or forgiveness or love from this celebration. i acknowledge that i am powerless, but i believe in a Higher Power. i cannot ben-franklin my way out of sin. in striving to be better, i get caught despairing over my failures. i am loved. let me spread that love in the world.



a scary passage, growing up, was the discussion of the unforgivable sin in Matthew (12:32): "And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

Lots of bullshit about this, but I've always learned that the unforgivable sin was despair: believing you were beyond saving. I had trouble with that, too. But what if, the unforgivable sin is despair, precisely because while despairing there is nothing one can do. Despair is precisely the state of being beyond salvation, because it is precisely a belief that one can do nothing. And if goodness lies in doing something--not, incidentally, in "works"; i'm not that Catholic--then the paralysis of despair is its opposite. there is nothing that can be forgiven in one's despair; it is entirely internal and passive.

what can be done, then, is to acknowledge that one is powerless. and set off in the ruts one has carved for oneself. despair cracks under the weight of ritual and tradition.


i want all my books in one place.

usage difference

consider what part means:
"part of a team"
"part of a whole"
"part of myself"

finished kaddish. man. it's been a long time since i've cried three times while reading any book. wow-oh-wow. and there'd be all these places where i'd just catch my breath.

things i'm thinking about:

"The rabbis famously say those who cannot pray for the sake of praying should pray anyway, because it will bring them to praying for praying's sake. I never liked this statement. It is behaviorism or it is opportunism, since it finds a religious utility for faithlessness, and thereby steals the thunder from belief and unbelief. Anyway, it is obvious that many people who pray do not pray for prayer's sake, and do not bring to prayer the philosophical propositions on which it must be premised. Are there times, then, when philosophy does not matter? Of course. The world would not work if it waited on philosophical understanding. Tt is a good thing that people act in the absence of reasons, or of clear reasons. Thoughtlessness is a lubricant of life. And yet it will not do to say that we are muddling through and that is the end of it. It is always possible to muddle through less complacently. Even though one may act without reasons, one should search for reasons. Even though one may pray without meaning it, one should mean it."

I have lots of thoughts about this, but there is dried fruit to pack.

Another couple of paragraphs, that relates in some way to what I was thinking about this morning:

"It is not precisely the case, as the religious existentialists and the philosophers of a tragic life and the theologians in the age of totalitarianism have all asserted, I mean the Jewish ones, that the Jewish tradition is "immanent," and enamored of finitude, and unburdened by the belief in the perfectibility of man. No religious system or moral system can do without the belief in the perfectibility of man. The moralists in the Jewish tradition, too, insist on compliance with the highest standards of conduct, and they base those standards on metaphysical absolutes, and they scold harshly. What else are they to do? Values do not wink. Finitude is not an exemption. Quite the contrary: only finite beings may be ethical beings.

Forgiveness, not forgiveness.

The task is to distinguish between human perfectibility and human perfection, and to recognize that perfectibility is a greater condition than perfection. The animals are perfect, insofar as they are always what they must be; but we are never what we must be. We are the ones from whom moer may always be demanded."



--
Today in the Austin airport, I had just finished Kaddish and was a little sad, in the way that airports often bring me near tears, and once again Christian music popped into my head, to enable me to be sad but to be sad towards something but this time it was not the old songs, but the Catholic liturgy that I am just begining to know. I was both pleased and sad. Some things end, others begin.

Maybe I'm trying to answer Mag's question. Why am I going to church if not for her?

written inna nairport

the problem with staying friends with someone you're breaking up with is finding room to mourn. it's easy to find room to be ecstatic and to worry and to be scared, but i at least am having trouble remembering how to be sad, not for myself but for this ungainly hatchling thing that has landed in my life and just as abruptly has flumped off somewhere else.

i'm a little bit lost; my army has disbanded; i'm wandering the same terrain but without the wind at my back and the roads turned to mud and nowhere can I find the wide plain stretching with tents. but see?

the majesty of an army isn't being part of a team. it's being part of a unity, an identity, a whole. i am these. the branding of cults book describes the end of marines training and i'm caught by the image of the exhausted recruits coming over the top of their last mountain and down the hill towards the sun rising over the pacific ocean and becoming aware of hundreds of other marines cresting the same rise and the ones near by and beginning barely to cry and their commanding officers addressing them for the first time as Marines.

made me want to be a marine. heck, that book made me want to be a lot of things. marine, mormon, member of various cults, a Harley Davidson rider. it's that sense of membership i'm after. i haven't really felt part of something bigger in that way in a long time--i feel very out-for-myself even when i'm working towards what i think will be best for the institutions i care about.

maybe that's why i'm going to church? because i see in that church (and in that ceremony) a chance for the kind of membership i miss from Balmoral and even Lake Travis? i'm not entirely sure that i believe that. maybe mag and me at that church feels like my own little family. i know there's something there that i need to need.

cheap trick: i want you to want me

during my last serious brush with faith--or rather with my unbelief--i could only come to terms with two prayers. one was "lord, I believe, help my unbelief" and the other was the prayer of the sinner beside the side of the pharisee in the Temple in one of the Gospels. I can't even remember its words. over the past few years, those have slipped away from me; i'm not Christian in any sense and I lost my ability to pray them meaningfully.

since then, i've gained prayers, too. Once i tried the prayer in /Franny and Zooey/ for a few days--"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy in me"--trying to pray ceaselessly to see what it was like and its remained something that my mouth does when i'm at my most afflicted. similarly, the hymn "sanctuary" has been a solace to me, just in its sounds, because i associate it with such happy thoughts. and junior year, when i wanted so much to be cared for, the Prayer of St. Francis took over my heart.

but none of them have meant much to me religiously. they've been mantras or invocations, summoning-ups of mental states and tools to regulate my brain processes. i haven't had even that belief that allows one to pray to an imaginary God. (this, presumably, only makes sense to those who have had the feeling.)

also--and probably unrelatedly--i've become entirely egotistical. ben franklin has become a symbol for me of relentless self-improvement backed by a limitless self-regard, like a fashioning of self out of the materials of ego--i feel very ben franklin.

to bow my head in that church (everyone else kneels; i'm not Catholic) and repeat to myself "I recognize that I am powerless" from something the priest said was somehow transformative. i recognize that i am powerless to defeat sin on my own. i am constantly striving to be good and constantly failing. i mistreat the people i love; i am selfish; i think hurtful thoughts that i don't believe; i benefit from a position of power and privilege that i have not earned and am not doing anything to redeem; i sin. i recognize that i am powerless to fix myself on my own. there's no ben-franklin-ing out of this one. i can and should and must strive to be better, but i can't fight egotism with more egotism. i recognize that i am powerless.

that last paragraph doesn't really manage to say what i'm trying to say, but i suspect that i'm going to keep trying to say it for awhile. i've always thought christianity's views on sin are HORRIBLY wack. i'm skeptical of any moral philosophy that believes that people are fundamentally bad or that encourages guilt or that tries to replace the hard work of repairing the world with some sort of spiritual balderdash. i think religious wars are monumentally stupid. i can't buy any of the mythology.

but sunday i was struck by the fact that i can't fix myself. i'm trying to change my tires while driving. and maybe the idea of the Divine gives me room to be broken and the energy to love myself while i set about the work of being who I want to be and maybe a space where i can offer others myself rather than a fabrication for public consumption and maybe the peace to love others in their brokenness.

sometimes this seems enlightening and sometimes this seems like words.

O Lord, make me an instrument of Your Peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.

Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.