The Road Not (yet) Taken

The question is not whether I am to respond to the malignant evil steadily engulfing our country: this evil systematically destroying a hallowed system of governance entrusted to our safekeeping, this evil poisoning the hearts and minds of sane and decent citizens in a paroxysm of collective psychosis, this evil driving our planet past a tipping point beyond which its capacity to support the human species becomes increasingly dubious.

No, a response is surely required of me—if for no other reason than as a practicing Christian and contemplative teacher, that is at the heart of what I take the Gospel of John to be demanding of us when it proclaims: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” Like Jesus, we are “given” into this world, required to bear witness to it, to love and cherish it, to safeguard it as best we are able on our watch.

I gently push past the hesitations of colleagues both contemplative and Gurdjieffian, who essentially offer me mirror images of the same fear: that in taking a stand, I risk losing impartiality. I no longer float above the turmoil, but risk getting dragged under by it, becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

But Jesus himself took a stand at the temple when he threw out the money changers and taunted the Pharisees, in effect sealing his political doom. And Gurdjieff risked himself mightily to stay on in occupied Paris during the darkest days of World War II to bring food and solace to his neighbors and an imaginal transfusion of love to an aching world, carried principally through his esoteric work with his most advanced students. When impartiality gets played off against conscience, in my books conscience wins hands down; insofar as it directly reflects the heart, it points to the higher resolution.

So no, declining to engage is not an option for me. The real question is how to engage; On what level and through what interpretive frame can my particular post and spiritual skill set be offered to greatest effectiveness? And it is just here that the Wisdom path seems to fork, offering me not two but three viable options, which in these next few posts I would like to think through with you.

It seems manifestly clear that the ordeal currently playing out on our national and worldwide viewing screen is a massive reaction— or corrective—to an unfolding that has somehow wandered badly off-course. But on what timeline is this corrective playing out, and for what purpose is it being applied? It is that “for what purpose?” that leaves me stymied and scratching my head. Immediately my mind goes to those three interpretive lenses, each offering its own analysis of the present dilemma and its own optimal path of response. I call these three lenses “historical time,” “Gebserian time,” and “Teilhardian time.”

Historical time thinks in terms of decades, at best centuries. Gebserian time thinks in terms of “structures of consciousness,” which equate roughly with cultural epochs, or in other words, millennia. Teilhardian time thinks in terms of geological time and is measured in tens of thousands, even millions, of years. Each of these viewing lenses affords a significantly different take on where the original deviation occurred and what the corresponding course correction wants to be.

Historical time is arguably the lens through which most of us are seeing the political situation today. For most educated Westerners, it is arguably the only lens that exists. We Americans rehearse the founding of our democracy, whose 250^th birthday we will either be celebrating or “celebrating” less than six months away. We recall that our country was founded at the highwater mark of the 18^th century European Enlightenment based on principles of individual freedom, equality, and human rights still apparently well ahead of the human evolutionary curve. For 250 years it has been brilliantly articulated and passionately defended by our forbearers, of courage and conscience apparently greater than our own. Historians such as Heather Cox Richardson trace the roots of how the seeds of discontent got planted in this beloved vineyard and come up with obvious benchmarks in populism, civil rights, secularism, and “wokeness.” We see how these seeds were craftily woven together in some “higher up” collusion on a warp of populist sentiment and a weft of oligarchian greed, with Donald Trump emerging as its poster child and golden calf hierophant.

Viewed from this framework—along with most of the rest of my liberal-progressively minded confreres, I understand that a cherished structure of governance is under siege by a malignant collusion of greed, grandiosity, and deviousness. My job is to name, articulate, and defend—to “speak truth to power,” in the words of my own Quaker forbears, who shrank from involvement no less than Jesus himself. It is to use my speaking platform to support a continuous calling the question, naming over and over those gospel teachings on love of the stranger, inclusion, compassion, and justice, even at the risk of my personal comfort and safety, even at the risk of tangling with people’s projections of what a contemplative is supposed to be, even at the risk of my own life. That is the path I see and admire so deeply in people like Pope Leo, The Rt. Rev. Mary Anne Budde, The Rt. Rev. Robert Hirschfield, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, my own bishop here in Maine The Rt. Rev. Thomas Brown: those who have held our feet to the fire and pointed the Church unswervingly back to the cost of discipleship. And that is the path of engagement I would unquestionably walk down were it not for those other two time-grids that play in my mind even as my feet are strapping into their galoshes….

Stay tuned. Next post will be coming up shortly.