“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” So said Thoreau. And my Mum.
[Six-minute read. But take your time, friends. I did. And by God, so did they.]
[Furthermore: I don’t know myself whom I thought I was talking to. You might think it was just to myself. You might think, “Ancestors.” The heavenly choir. Imaginings. Muses. “The con-chorus on high.” (I made up that word. Praise and prizes to you if you figure out its etymology!) In any case, it was my birthday when this convo started. They were kind. I learned things. I’m glad we had this talk…]
Happy birthday to you, James H! Hard to believe that you are x years old in the visible outer world as of today. You don’t look a day over x-5.
Ha! I appreciate that. Only rarely do I truly feel as shiny and blessed as I fortunately and undoubtedly am, but I worked on that this morning. “My God, my Adored One, my King, my Desire! What tongue can voice my thanks to Thee?…” That’s an oldie-but-goodie, and it helped. First Bahá’í prayer I ever got by heart.
Yes. You were so cute at 15. Walking home from 463 Caithness, head down, eyes down, somehow managing to see through all that hair. It had been another encounter with that dazzling young woman and her gentle mother and their various co-conspirators. (Such dangerous folks!) They had given you your first prayer book and there you were, muttering that first prayer over and over, all the way home.
Dangerous, yeah. They pushed me head-first into wakefulness. “This little piggie” recited prayers, all the way home. It felt strange and absolutely essential. Aid and Assistance was the first theme in the American collection, still is! “My God, my Adored One…” was the first prayer in that edition. So off I went.
You were so earnest! We could see it felt logical to you to approach it that way, but we also heard the monstrous idealism that hummed and drummed behind that “rational” choice. It was the first prayer in the book, written by Bahá’u’lláh. You decided that should be the first conscious deposit in your spiritual memory bank, alongside The Lord’s Prayer¹ and surprisingly large pieces of the 23rd Psalm. And only a couple of hundred more to go!
Well, I didn’t count them, but thanks for laughing with me.
You surely didn’t do the math. And you also thought that prayer book contained ALL the prayers, you English chauvinist, you!
Guilty as charged. I was quite in love with the Báb, all those stories of youthfulness and radical inspiration, heroism and joy that weren’t ancient history. And I was fascinated — I had some embarrassing theories — that there were so few of His prayers, and they were all so brief! I figured that He was a short-prayer specialist.
Your 15-year-old thoughts are safe with us. But listen. “Embarrassing“? We’ve been trying to tell you this for a long time: do keep working on backing up that blame train; it’s rolling and sounding in the back-country of your mind all the time, and its horn bellows too loudly and too often. It’s no wonder, though. You did hear that stunning phrase a little too often. You know the one we mean. So don’t blame the Blamers, either. It was always a less-than-helpful sentence, but as folks used to say, it was “in the water” back then. That tainted stream ran all the way back to the Church Fathers. Easy to say, here and now (whatever those two words might mean!), that perhaps if there had been some Church Mothers on the construction team, some of that Original Shame might have been left out! Well. Let’s say the words out loud, and remind you that they aren’t and were never true. “You Ought To Be Ashamed Of Yourself!” What a thing to tell a child! Especially when a tender heart and romantic mind (to be clear, we’re talking about yours) learns to regard this phrase as not just a finger-wagging criticism, but as some toxic cousin to the Golden Rule.
Whoa. That’s a lot. Are you saying that I just, um, inhaled y’oughta be ashamed as, I don’t know, one of the laws of life? Is that what I did?
Yes. You came to feel that you should, in a general way, feel shame about the whole business of being James. It was always a lie. It took you a long time to find enough words and experiences and tools for reflection to see that, but now you do.
By God! You’re right. I can hear it now. Aunties. Parents, certainly. Frustrated and thoughtless teachers, probably even exasperated older siblings, and I see what you mean: probably they had all been forced to inhale those sinful fumes themselves. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Really?! Who thought that these were Words to Live By?
You took them to heart, so literally, but well before you could read much. You were still very young by the time they were fully installed, in the years just before turning 15. And all those people that delivered this thought? They were, as you have realized, mainly doing the best they could, most of the time, with what life had offered to them. And that’s a more useful sort of rule to adopt – that folks in general do and think what they regard as good and proper, though they may be dead wrong.
Yes. That one works for me, even when I (on special occasions) apply it to myself. The following phrase feels related somehow, so what do you think about this one? “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” This is another heavily loaded sentence that comes to mind for me, time and again. There have been so many ‘good ideas’. Smoking cigarettes. Tackle football. Cheez Whiz. Paving paradise. Bellbottom jeans. Trickle-down economics. (Never quite got that one.) Coaching basketball, apparently forever. Fidget spinners. Burning fossil fuels.
Those are a good start. How about the invention of billionaires?
Wait. We did that?
Maybe not on purpose, but of course you did. Did you think that was God’s plan? Remember Christ and the moneylenders? How He compared rich men to camels? And long before we got to the level of “wealth inequality” we see now, Bahá’u’lláh warned against such unjust extremes. And here’s another one: what about the idea that redemptive violence is effective? Remember all those comic books you inhaled before you could think?
Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. (I was reading them awhile before I realized Sgt. meant “sargent”, in American.) Iron Man. Captain America. I remember. They solved problems by kicking bad-guy butt. We like that playbook, don’t we?
Many of you know better, but it’s a seductive story to tell yourselves. Humans have a lot of narratives that are thrilling to tell, but idiotic to live by. So let’s step back a bit. Ready? Consider this paradox that so many of you still seem to swallow so easily: the undoubted fact that you, and those close to you, are mainly well-intentioned and benevolent, but that somehow “human nature” and All Those People Over There are certainly dangerous and prone to evil?
That’s a good one, yes. We hear that all the time, in various forms. The people I know are good folks, but human nature is cursed and humanity is awful. Seems to be an obvious flaw in the logic, but it sums up the way huge numbers of people see the world. Holy jumpin’! That must be pretty painful to watch from over there.
Don’t get us started. (Okay. Too late.) You earth-bound types often appear to toggle back and forth between the glorification of war, that redemptive violence fantasy again, and a toxic stew of defeatist assumptions that while war is clearly horrible, it is also inevitable and constant. “It’s a feature of the human condition,” it has become trendy to say, “and not a bug.” Of course, war is terrifyingly awful. War does destroy civilized arts and wonders and constructs. But why insist on imagining that the slow work of building and growing and learning, all those fruits of cooperation and peace, are strange? Exceptional? From here, it’s so obvious that all those grim modern fairy tales of existence as the “nasty, brutal” battle for individualistic domination and control — sorry to say, James H, but you ingested a lot of this nonsense, too! — were incomplete, at best, and often just foolish. “Survival of the friendliest” as a new look at human evolution — isn’t that an idea from that Dutch writer you were all excited about a few years ago?
Are you still with us?
Ouch. My brain hurts. You’ve had a lot more time than me to think about all this.
Well, yes. That “time” concept. Now that’s an entire discussion in itself, but this is enough. Your mind isn’t “blown”, exactly – notice what an explosive, war-like analogy that is, with its implication of lasting damage and a difficult re-build? – but we can see that you have some mental digesting to do. “My brain is full,” we’ve heard you smilingly protest. The old meal metaphor, much more apt in this case. And we liked to use that one, too, once upon a time.
You’re right. I need the proverbial stroll after dinner to process all this. But it’s been wonderful, consoling, wistful, humbling. I’m honoured that you stopped by to visit. Happy birthday to me!
Well, you did open the door. “What tongue can voice my thanks to Thee?” is an awesome way to start ANY day. And look how clever you were, putting that into your heart when you were just a boy! Now, remember to leave the door unlocked. And open a window now and then, okay?
That’s a shot of loving-kindness. Yes, I will! And thank you, wish I knew y’all better! Don’t be strangers. Please. (But I do know what side the estrangement comes from.) And hey, I have some time, right? I guess I just keep on beseeching, is that it? “…aid and assist me at all times and under all conditions, [I] seek from the heaven of Thy grace Thine ancient favour…” Don’t be afraid to ask for help, and all that? That’s the way, isn’t it?
Right?
I suppose I answer that one for myself. Time to go. And thanks again.
