Finding Joy despite the Shadow of Sadness

 The Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021 has forced everyone in the world to live with a shadow cast over their lives.  Sometimes that shadow has become greater with the loss of a family member or friend.  Even for those who have not experienced that kind of loss and grief directly, life has become more circumscribed with social-distancing and other restriction for safety.  We all need to be able to find a kind of joy -- even if only a small hidden joy -- despite the pandemic. That is why I found the following article from Wisdom in Leaves five years ago uplifting.  I hope it can also be so for you. It was titled "Laughing Beneath the Meteors."

~ ~ ~

What was it about the written reminiscence that made it so appealing?  Why could I so easily identify with the firsthand experience that was being described, and with the inner feeling the writer remembered?  It was a recollection by a poet in his twenties, thinking back to an occasion of nighttime camaraderie with peers:

"Some day I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes....  and how we laughed till the meteors showered round us,

 and we fell calm under the winter stars.

 And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time.

 And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us,

 we praised God with louder whistling...."

As I read this recollection, I almost wished I were there myself.  The cool night air.  The feeling of relaxation among friends.  The happiness and contentment.  The star-filled sky above.  The wonder of a sudden meteor shower.

Even as relaxing and restorative as those things were, there was also a deeper layer that gently emerged.  It seemed to have to do with that experience young people can have when they feel their youthful idealism beginning to be channeled into the paths of their individual identities:

"[S]ome of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time."

I felt as if I knew those subjective emotions because I had experienced them myself at that stage of adolescence:  The paradox of joyful freedom despite not knowing what the future will hold. The only thing I had not experienced as such was the meteor shower.  But I still felt as if I could understand the meaning of what the author described.  Today, in our U.S. popular culture, such things as meteors get mentioned mostly in the form of the fear that a massive asteroid might hit the Earth, bringing devastation.  Modern science also tells us that our sun will eventually burn out, bringing death to the Earth.  Terrifying scenarios caused by uncontrollable events in outer space abound (guaranteeing work for screenwriters of disaster movies).  In contrast, the young poet remembers laughing with his companions as the meteors rained down.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The reminiscence has a power of its own.  But it is given added poignancy by knowing that it was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died at the age of 25, fighting in World War I.  Owen's war poems have a sensitivity of feeling not unlike that which is revealed in this reminiscence, shared by letter with a friend the year before Owen was killed in battle.

To me, the reminiscence, even as brief as it is, conveys an experience of belonging.  The combination of the companionship of friends and the surrounding realm of Nature convey a sense of ultimate belonging.  Wilfred Owen is now gone.  But nighttime is still cooler than the day. Overhead, there are still stars.  And there is still, I am sure, at least one more shooting star ready to be seen as it pierces the air
we breath.

~~~

Have you ever experienced a moment of deep contentment while you were in Nature?

(Owen's reminiscence is quoted in "Memoir (1931)" by Edmund Blunden,

in the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.  p. 172.)

(The photograph of Owen is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Of Campfires and Stars

Even before there was writing, humans gathered around fires.
And even before there was writing, humans told stories.  As those ancient humans sat around fires at night, telling stories, they would have noticed some of the sparks from the fire ascending against the darkness of the night sky.  As their eyes followed those sparks upward, some of those sparks would have seemed to almost merge with their cousins -- the stars.  And as those humans looked upward and told stories, some of those random stars became transformed into constellations. They saw animals and legendary heroes there:  A bear.  A scorpion.  Orion.  And thus, the cosmic dome became part of the narratives about human lives.

Today, the idealized campfire is a symbol of belonging and peace.  It is a place where we hope people will come together to find belonging and a warmth of spirit.

The literary analyst Harold Bloom provided a revealing analysis of the connection between fire and belonging in one narrative in the Bible's book of Luke (22:54-62).  After Jesus is arrested, his disciple Peter flees into the darkness of the night.  Peter is alone and cut off in the coldness of the night.  But then he notices a fire burning in the distance.  On many occasions in the past, Peter's companions and Jesus spent time around such fires at night, sharing stories.  And so, the lonely Peter is drawn towards this new fire, around which people are huddled.  But when Peter draws closer to this fire, his face becomes illuminated, and so he is recognized as being a disciple of Jesus, the identity which he had been trying to conceal.  Peter and the strangers around the fire have not felt their common humanity.  And Peter flees back into the darkness of the cold night.

There is a larger way the sense of belonging can become lost.  Jeffrey Sobosan recounts an incident involving a mentor of his, "an old priest who had .... contributed brilliantly to his own specialty in theology, and now at the close of life had given himself over to what he once described as his first love, the study of the stars."  Sobosan continues:

"I met him in a garden one evening, where he sat by his beloved telescope...
with a look of ineffable sadness in his eyes.... He spoke of the beauty of the universe...
but in striving after this beauty,... his mind had taken a savage turn ...
toward the damning conclusion: the universe is void of meaning."

The vast cosmos had, for him, become alien.

It is not hard to understand why Sobosan's mentor-priest felt himself betrayed by the cosmos, which he had hoped would provide him a comforting beauty with its views though the telescope.  Even though telescopes have revealed much more of this vast universe, the view through a telescope is a narrowing of our immediate field of vision. It is somewhat like trying to view an ocean through a ship's small porthole.  As the philosopher Max Oelschlaeger explains, using Galileo as an example:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding
a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

A sweeping field of vision can encompass both those stars and ourselves in one grand narrative.  And that narrative can give us a sense of universal belonging -- provided we remember our common humanity as part of that domed narrative.  The story-telling circle must become wider than the ring around our particular campfire.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have any recollection of being around a campfire in a way that increased your sense of belonging?  When was it?  What was it like?)

(The Sobosan quotation is from his Romancing the Universe: Theology, Science, and Cosmology. © 1999. p. 1.)

(The Oelschlaeger quotation if from his The Idea of Wilderness. © 1991. p. 78.)

Laughing Beneath the Meteors

What was it about the written reminiscence that made it so appealing?  Why could I so easily identify with the firsthand experience that was being described, and with the inner feeling the writer remembered?  It was a recollection by a poet in his twenties, thinking back to an occasion of nighttime camaraderie with peers:

"Some day I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes....  and how we laughed till the meteors showered round us,

 and we fell calm under the winter stars.

 And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time.

 And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us,

 we praised God with louder whistling...."

As I read this recollection, I almost wished I were there myself.  The cool night air.  The feeling of relaxation among friends.  The happiness and contentment.  The star-filled sky above.  The wonder of a sudden meteor shower.

Even as relaxing and restorative as those things were, there was also a deeper layer that gently emerged.  It seemed to have to do with that experience young people can have when they feel their youthful idealism beginning to be channeled into the paths of their individual identities:

"[S]ome of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time."

I felt as if I knew those subjective emotions because I had experienced them myself at that stage of adolescence:  The paradox of joyful freedom despite not knowing what the future will hold. The only thing I had not experienced as such was the meteor shower.  But I still felt as if I could understand the meaning of what the author described.  Today, in our U.S. popular culture, such things as meteors get mentioned mostly in the form of the fear that a massive asteroid might hit the Earth, bringing devastation.  Modern science also tells us that our sun will eventually burn out, bringing death to the Earth.  Terrifying scenarios caused by uncontrollable events in outer space abound (guaranteeing work for screenwriters of disaster movies).  In contrast, the young poet remembers laughing with his companions as the meteors rained down.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The reminiscence has a power of its own.  But it is given added poignancy by knowing that it was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died at the age of 25, fighting in World War I.  Owen's war poems have a sensitivity of feeling not unlike that which is revealed in this reminiscence, shared by letter with a friend the year before Owen was killed in battle.

To me, the reminiscence, even as brief as it is, conveys an experience of belonging.  The combination of the companionship of friends and the surrounding realm of Nature convey a sense of ultimate belonging.  Wilfred Owen is now gone.  But nighttime is still cooler than the day. Overhead, there are still stars.  And there is still, I am sure, at least one more shooting star ready to be seen as it pierces the air we breath.

~~~

Have you ever experienced a moment of deep contentment while you were in Nature?

(Owen's reminiscence is quoted in "Memoir (1931)" by Edmund Blunden,

in the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.  p. 172.)

(The photograph of Owen is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Finding the Thread of the Story

Long before there was the first written word, people looked up at the night sky and sensed that their life on Earth was part of a larger world, a larger story.  Once the rhythmic, circular movements of the sun and stars were charted, the mathematical harmony of that larger story came over time to be called "the music of the spheres" --  circular movements seeming to repeat themselves to eternity. However, in the 20th century, a different but also awesome story emerged from modern astronomers.  It is the story of how our universe began with a Big Bang, leading to the formation of galaxies, to our Sun, then to our planet Earth, and finally to life upon it.

Because that often-repeated narrative has come out of the discoveries of modern science, it seems so scientific, so objective.  Unlike ancient cultures' imaginative creation stories with their own messages to tell, the modern scientifically-based narrative gives the appearance of being just facts, not prejudiced by human desires.  Often overlooked, however, is one critical way in which that modern scientific narrative is unconsciously shaped by a human bias.

Think about it:  Why is that story of our universe, which begins with the Big Bang, always told with life on planet Earth as the outcome of its narrative?  Why is it told as a chain of events leading to the development of planet Earth?  A narrative could be constructed just as scientifically that would lead to planet X in galaxy Y, or to planet Z circling around one of many other suns in a different solar system.  The actual history of the universe is that of countless causes-and-effects scattering throughout the cosmos in innumerable directions.  Multiple chronologies, not just the one that leads to our home planet.

Thus analyzed, that often-repeated narrative about the universe that modern science has made possible reveals itself to be not totally objective.  But that is just as well.  After all, what meaning could it bring to us if we did not follow the thread of the story that leads to life on Earth and even to us?  The scientists who tell our modern story of the universe have thus revealed themselves to be not just scientists but also narrative-makers -- storytellers!  They have thus engaged in an ancient art.

Narratives are not simply an imaginative form of art. They can also be sources of knowledge. We humans can comprehend the world when we isolate threads that form a narrative.  The modern theologian John Haught speaks to this point when he writes:

"For human subjects the world is not experienced, at least in a rich or interesting way, apart from stories....  There is a narrative quality to all of our experience, and it is from stories, whether mythic or historical, that we acquire any sense or reality at all."

Looked at in still another way, one message of modern science's story of the universe is that out of the universe have emerged, of all things, storytellers!

~~~

Has your life been a story?  How?

(The Haught quotation is from Is Nature Enough?

  Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, by John F. Haught.  © 2006. p. 46.)

Animals Emerging Out of Darkness

Tens of thousands of years ago, human beings would have sat around fires after dark, listening to storytellers.  Occasionally their eyes would have followed sparks rising upward in the fire's heat -- bright sparks joining the stars against the darkness of the night sky.  I imagine that while looking up into the night sky and listening to the storyteller, their minds would have begun to see shapes -- constellations -- emerging out of the myriad stars:  Images of animals and of people.  There, a bear!  And there, a scorpion!

An immense time later, in the 9th century C.E., a man named Jahiz (or "al-Jahiz") described a different way that animals emerged out of darkness.  Jahiz wrote about how he and Bedouin travelers camping in the desert at night had repeatedly observed a series of animals coming out of the surrounding darkness.  First came the flying insects, drawn into the campfire's circle of light.  Then, looking for food as well as warmth, came lizards, mice, snakes, and even foxes. Sometimes as many as seventy different kinds of animals would emerge on a single night.

 
from The Book of Animals

Jahiz collected such accounts and spun them together with stories, other observations of animals, and philosophical reflections in his Book of Animals.  It was more than an inventory of those animals that emerged out of the darkness.  What also emerged into the awareness of the Bedouins and Jahiz was how the animals seemed to form a hierarchy from tiny to large, and how the animals' lives were tied together with multiple interrelationships. Jahiz (being also a writer of philosophy and theology) added to that awareness his answer to some Bedouins' question of why the Creator had made noxious creatures.  Jahiz explained to his companions in the desert (and to his readers) that:  "Each species constitutes a food for another species....  Divine Wisdom has decreed that some species are the source of food for others, and some species are the cause of death for others."

Orpheus and the Beasts

Constellations emerging into focus. Real animals coming out of the darkness.  So also have animals emerged into the lives, culture, consciousness, and imagination of human beings.  That emergence occurred in a transformative way in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, when animals were domesticated for food and labor. There was also another form of emergence as animals became part of humans' mythologies, legends, fables, and proverbs.

In the 20th century, as our societies became more urban, animals often faded into the background, often forgotten except for when we took outings to the zoo or to national parks. Today, however, I think animals might be re-emerging into our human consciousness in a new way.  As we watch TV shows such as Nature and National Geographic, we learn about more of life's immense diversity -- the number of species being almost as innumerable as stars in the night sky.  Also, we are trying to bring into sharper focus how we might be caretakers for threatened species so that they will not become extinct, like stars extinguished into darkness.

~~~

Are there occasions on which you think of animals?  What are those occasions?

(The Jahiz quote is from his Living Beings,

as quoted in Darwin's Ghosts by Rebecca Stoat, © 2012, p. 53.)
(The page from the Arabic book is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.) 

Rising Above a Narrow Vision

My wife recalls a day in her teens when she helped shingle the steep roof of her mother's Michigan house.  My wife says that being on such a high slope was so scary that by the end of the afternoon she had worn off most of the fabric of the seat of her jeans, having never dared stand up.  I know myself that sloped roofs can be scary.  However, in many cultures down through time, and even today, a flat, level roof has been a means to rise above the pressures of life, to lift one's spirits, re-connect with Nature, and even expand one's vision.

I have experienced myself that occasional desire "to get away from earth awhile," as Robert Frost put it in his poem "Birches."  However, because I grew up in U.S. suburbs, I did not experience firsthand how claustrophobic living in a dense city can at times become.  So, I think it was through the R & B song "Up on the Roof" that I first heard testimony of how healing to the human spirit getting up on a roof can be.   People living in dense cities, and especially in ghettos, do not have pliant sling-like birches to lift themselves and their spirits above the ground when life's burdens get too heavy.  A roof can help.  As the songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King conveyed, getting "Up on the Roof" can enable a person to rise above the street noise, and above walls that are too close, and even above life's troubling cares.

rooftops in Athens

In many countries of the Mideast, houses have been traditionally built with flat roofs, in part because of the hot climate.  Unlike that wintry climate in which my wife's mother's house was built with a steep roof so snow would not accumulate, Mideastern peoples have had to deal with heat.  A cave-like house is protection against the daytime sun. But once the sun has been down awhile, being up on the roof -- even sleeping up there -- can be a relief.  So important has been the roof as one living space that ancient Jewish law in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) included a building code requiring that "When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof.. [because someone might] fall from it." (Deut. 22:8, NRSV).

Roofs can be a place for cooling off, both literally and figuratively.   They can even be a place for raising one's sights as we re-connect with the healing touch of Nature.  A light breeze.  The sight perhaps of a distance shore.  And seeing the stars.

stars wider than our vision

The most expressive testimony I have read to that fact was by a twelve-year old black urban girl, as recorded by the psychologist Robert Coles.  In the girl's own words:  "I guess I'm doin' all right....  A  lot of time, though, I wish I could... find myself... a place where I could walk and walk, and I'd be walking on grass, not cement....  At night, sometimes, when I get to feeling real low, I'll climb up the stairs to our [apartment's] roof, and I'll look at the sky, and I'll say hello there, you moon and all your babies -- stars!  [U]p there, I feel I can stop and think about what's happening to me-- it's the only place I can, the only place."

~~~

Have you experienced Nature's ability to lift spirits?  Has that ever involved expanding your vision?

(The quotation by the girl is from Robert Coles's introduction in

The Geography of Childhood, by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, © 1994. p. xxii.)

The Starry Sky

I most recently encountered the idea in F. C. Happold's Religious Faith and Twentieth-Century Man.  Like a number of other thoughtful Christian writers over the past half-century, Happold (a modern mystic ) has commented upon the contrast between the cosmology of Biblical times and the one provided by our contemporary astronomy.  These writers know that the Bible was not meant to be science.  Nevertheless, they raise the question of whether "modern man's" way of thinking about the world is now so different that we cannot respond spiritually in a way paralleling that of people several centuries ago.  They point out how we now have detailed scientific knowledge of the cosmos, and ask if the kind of religious sentiment felt by people centuries ago is not diminished in contrast.

But I wonder.  I recognize that there has been an immense change in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos... but still I wonder.  I wonder whether it is our increased knowledge of astronomy that poses the problem, or perhaps something else.  I wonder if the challenge doesn't come more from some side effects of our scientific technology.

In Biblical times, people did not know about light-years of distance, or about the millions of galaxies, or about an expanding universe.  Those people could, however, simply look up at the sky at night and see more stars than anyone could count.  The stars were to them as innumerable as the grains of sand upon the shore (Gen. 22:17).  And those people's response could be sacred awe.

Today, most people rarely have the same experience, but I do not think it is because our scientific knowledge is so much greater.  It is instead because our firsthand experience of the night sky is so limited.  When we today look up at the sky at night, we most likely see only a fraction of the number of stars Biblical man saw.  All the ambient city lights prevent us from seeing a black-velvet background of sky studded with stars beyond anyone's counting.

Even if there were not so many electric lights outside to interfere, would that mean there wouldn't still be another problem?  Wouldn't all our technological temptations (TV., computers, and cellphones) distract us?  Even when there are a fair number of stars visible, how often do you see people in U.S. cities pause from their activities to look up and survey the starry night sky?

time exposure of night sky

Even if I cannot see as many stars as I would like to, I still like to look up and see as many as I can -- and I find it so wondrous!  That is why I like to periodically leaf through my book of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems and read the opening lines of "The Starlight Night."  Those lines read:  

"Look at the stars!  look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!"

~~~

Do you have a favorite remembrance of having experienced the starry sky?

Degrees of Separation

"The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw -- and knew I saw -- 
all things in God, and God in all things.” 

 (Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th cent.)

"They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them."

(The Bhagavad Gita, 3rd cent, B.C.E.)

In their origins, these quotations, are separated by centuries, by cultures, and by miles of geography.  But they are of the same spirit.  Not too long ago, I recalled these memorable lines because I experienced some difficult communication between myself and a friend, causing us to both feel painfully the inescapable differences in our perspectives.

Quotations similar to these can be found in all of the world's great faith-traditions.  Such reminders of a fundamental unity endure because we humans know all too well how easily two friends, two partners, or two family members can become alienated.  (Not to mention the persistent barriers of nationality, ethnicity, and culture.)

Diagram of 6 degrees of separation

Over the past several years, the phrase "six degrees of separation" has entered our vocabulary. The supposition behind that phrase is that, beginning with any person, a series of six connections of some sort can be drawn linking that person to any other person.  (For example: Am I only six degrees from a movie star, if I include the cities I've lived in, and include someone who went to the movie star's high school?)  I wonder if the popularity of trying to find such 6-link chains may come in part from our living in ever-larger cities, causing us to be surrounded by more and more strangers.

The great mystics, such as the Christian Mechthild of Magdeburg and the author of that quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, see the world in a somewhat different way:  They say that if we see more deeply into reality, the number of degrees of separation is zero!

Here is where the critics of mysticism (whether religious or secular critics) are easily confused. Critics frequently dismiss mysticism by saying that mystics are impractical and out of touch with everyday reality.  If taken literally, a mystics claim that all is "one" seems obviously false.  For, after all, I can see with my eyes that there are two people right in front of me.  The mystics, however, lived lives just as real and practical as other people.  The difference was that they came to perceive a hidden unity that made the forms of separation shallow in comparison.

all a part of one universe
(16th-century drawing)

Modern science has put a new twist on this age-old dispute between the mystical and the commonplace viewpoints. Modern science, with its narrative of how our universe was born and evolved to us today, draws an actual, physical chain of links connecting everything  -- alienated people, animals, plants, and the inanimate.  As the contemporary Christian writer Matthew Fox explains:  " [The] very elements of which we are composed were in fact prepared billions of years ago in the stars themselves."

~~~

Do you have some way of handling alienation between you and someone else when it occurs?

(The Mechthild quote is taken from Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg, ed. Sue Woodruff, © 1982.  p. 42.)
(The passage [2:55] from The Bhagavad Gita is from the translation of Eknath Easwaran, © 1985.)

(The map of the universe by Thomas Digges is in the Public Domain because it is over 70 yrs. old.)

The Ambiguity of Nature

There is a somewhat apocryphal story about Albert Einstein having once been asked what is the most important question that can be asked.  As the often repeated story has it, his reply was "Whether the universe is friendly or not."  That story developed out of some other things Einstein did say (even though he never said quite those words).  I think that the story has taken that form because it speaks to a universal human concern.

Although few of us have Einstein's mathematical knowledge about the universe, we do encounter the non-human world on the level of what we call "Nature."  We experience sunrise and darkness, good and bad weather, trees producing fruit as well as falling on houses, melodious birds and insect pests, beautiful flowers and poison ivy.  As that list demonstrates, we encounter the ambiguous character of Nature, and so we easily ask whether the world is "friendly or not."

What gets tricky about this ambiguity is that the answer we come up with can depend so much upon our own perception.  We can interpret the same natural phenomenon in different ways.

In all the volumes of literature in which the ambiguity of Nature is addressed, one usually overlooked book is Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The young Huck (who is the book's narrator) perceives nature differently depending upon whether or not he is lonely.  Early in the narrative, when he is living with the Widow Douglas, with whom he feels no camaraderie, Nature seems ominous.  Alone in his room at night, Huck describes how it was "so lonesome I most wished I was dead.  The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful;... and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me."

In contrast, after Huck begins to develop a somewhat brotherly friendship with Jim on their raft journey, Nature is experienced favorably by Huck.

As one example, Huck now depicts nighttime as being beautiful: "Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark -- which was a candle in a cabin window.... It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars."

In this example, Huck's human relationships affect his ability to feel at home in the natural world,  In contrast, in other cases, many people have discovered how Nature can become a healing balm or a source of companionship when human relationships could not comfort.  In those instances, Nature became the needed friend.

The issue is a spiritual one, because, as the 20th-century philosopher Ernst Bloch put it:

"The wish at the heart of religion is still 

that the human being should feel at home 

in the mystery of existence."

~~~

When have you felt at home in Nature?  How did the universe then feel to you?

(The Bloch quote is from his The Principle of Hope, © 1959,

as quoted in God in Creation by Jürgen Moltmann, © 1985, p. 321.)