In this essay I am going to point out four of the most common forms of flight from our essential freedom and indicate with some poetry and stories how our essential freedom is being lived and/or fled.
We live in a Land of Mystery.
We know nothing about it.
We don’t know where we have come from.
We don’t know where we are going.
We don’t know where we are.
We are newborn babes.
We have never been here before.
We have never seen this before.
We will never see it again.
This moment is fresh,
Unexpected,
Surprising.
As this moment moves into the past,
It cannot be fully remembered.
All memory is a creation of our minds.
And our minds cannot fathom the Land of Mystery,
much less remember it.
We experience Mystery Now
And only Now.
Any previous Now is gone forever.
Any yet-to-be Now is not yet born.
We live Now,
only Now,
in a Land of Mystery.
Denying the truth of this poem can be called “rationalism,” the notion that the real is rational or that rational is the real. The above poem is an attempt to point out that the real is not rational. The very best of human reasoning is never anything more than an approximation of the real. This is another way to say that the real is a mystery.
Rationalism
Fleeing in a personal way from our awareness of a permanent mysteriousness is the most common flight from our essential freedom. And to where do we flee? We flee to dogmas of the mind—whether dogma of science or dogma of religion or dogma of some other kind. We can flee to current wisdom or obsolete foolishness—any rational formation that can provide the true believer with a supposed certainty. Standing within the full awe or wonder of this All Powerful Land of Mystery, including its freedom, is a paradoxical sort of certainty. If we allow the uncertainty of our aware freedom to rule our living, we find that such perpetual uncertainty can be our “certainty” and our openness.
We need approximations of the real in order to navigate our lives within our natural and social environments. The culture in which we live is a webwork or weave of these “approximate certainties.” We grow up in a culture of particular approximate certainties that are being lived by us as if they were fully certain.
The maturity acquired through open living includes discovering that these approximate certainties of our culture are uncertain. The life story of Albert Einstein is a story of awakening to uncertainties in his own inherited “normal” science—the science so deeply improved by Sir Isaac Newton. Though it is true that Einstein’s wondrous imagination gave new vision to many of those older certainties, Einstein’s life story, even in the realm of his physics, involved making one serious mistake after another. Along with the freedom and the creativity of other physicists, it was Einstein’ own freedom and creativity that was demolishing his own older certainties. And while physics was never the same after Einstein got through with it, physics remains a set of approximate certainties that are still vulnerable to being overturned by better approximations of what is real.
Here is another story of freedom from certainty—this time from a religious luminary. There was a man, an accomplished thinker, a strongly religious man, a loyal Jew. He could read and write in both Hebrew and Greek; he traveled; he taught; he had a good reputation. Then it came to him that he was hiding from his true being in the thoughtfulness of these two cultures of learning. So he threw into the waste basket (symbolically speaking) all that accomplished education and religious thoughtfulness. And after a month or so living in a sort of nowhere/nobody status, he took all that wisdom out of the waste basket and put it to work assisting others to participate in his deep discovery of that freedom is at the heart of Judaism’s sense of absolute mysteriousness. His name was Saul. After his deep discovery, he changed his name. We remember him as Paul , a man who said that Christ had set us free.
In a series of letters Paul gave witness to his deep encounter with an enduring Mystery that transcended his culture, both his cultures. We misuse his writings when we expect them to be rational dogmas. He established Christian theologizing as an ongoing probe into a Mystery than never goes away. His words can also be viewed as describing the life of a permanent outsider (neither Jew nor Greek). Here is my 21st century definition of “the pitfall into rationalism”:
Rationalism: Hiding from Mystery in the thoughtfulness of our culture.
Moralism
Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of moralism:
Within this Land of Mystery
flows a River of Consciousness—
a flow of attention and freedom.
Consciousness is an enigma in this Land of Mystery.
Consciousness flows through body and mind like a river—
a moisture in the desert of things.
Consciousness is not our pain, pleasure, or rest;
not our desire, emotion, stillness, or passion.
These are like the rocks in the River of Consciousness
Consciousness is a flow through the body and with the body.
Consciousness is an alertness that is also
a freedom to intend and a will to do.
The mind is a tool of consciousness,
providing consciousness with the ability
to reflect upon itself.
But consciousness cannot be contained
within the images and symbols of the mind.
It is an enigma that mind
cannot comprehend – even noticing consciousness
is an act of consciousness using the mind and
flowing like a River in the Land of Mystery.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer read all of Paul’s writings. He also studied intently those many years of interpretations of Paul’s letters. He was especially conversant with Martin Luther’s interpretations of Paul. In his early twenties, Dietrich became a prominent student and writer of edge Christian topics. A topic that captured him deeply was the radical nature of the freedom for which, according to both Paul and Luther, Christ has set us free. Dietrich saw that this essential freedom is our deep and given ability to respond. We can enact a response-ability to whatever is happening in the history of our society and of our personal life. In Dietrich’s day, Adolf Hitler was conducting total war on the world for the sake of an exaggerated grandeur of German culture—a type of nationalism that was also arising elsewhere, but seldom with Hitler’s degree of fanatic zeal. Dietrich realized that he personally was free from Hitler’s kind of self created certainty. In fact Dietrich could see that he was free from any kind of ethical certainty. In his free responsibility, Dietrich and some of his close friends employed their freedom in an attempt on Hitler’s life. They almost succeeded. Dietrich did succeed in making a lasting cry for our essential freedom—a freedom that can be manifest in the midst of any set of cultural certainties in any moment of time.
Morality is a social process in every society and a necessity for having a workable social functioning. Morality itself is not a pitfall for freedom. In freedom, however, we can obey, disobey, and also improve the morality of our society. Moralism is my name for a pitfall of freedom. Just as ending rationalism is not a dismissal of reason, so ending moralism is not a dismissal of morality. Moral order is the part of way that a society restrains the physical, emotional, and intellectual violences of the human being toward other human beings. Society’s moral restraints are not moralism. Moralism means clinging absolutely or almost absolutely to some social law, norm, rule, or custom. Social morality has never dropped-down from some divine absolute or been sourced-up from some natural ground. Morality is invented by a social group. Our essential freedom includes the discovery of our response-ability to create morality. Here, then, is my 21st century definition of the “moralism” pitfall for our essential freedom:
Moralism: Hiding from Freedom in the ethical certainties of our culture.
Determinism
Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of determinism:
Within the Land of Mystery
rises a Mountain of Care –
care for self, care for others,
care for Earth, care for the cosmos,
care that we exist, care that we suffer
care that we may find rest and fulfillment,
care that we may experience our caring
and not grow numb and dead.
It takes no effort to care.
It takes effort not to care.
Care is given with the Land of Mystery.
Care is part of the Mystery of Being.
We care, we just care, we are made of care.
Care is a Mountain because care is so huge,
so challenging to embrace, to climb, to live.
Care is a demand upon us that is more humbling,
more consuming, more humiliating,
than all the authorities, laws, and obligations
of our social existence.
Care is a forced march into the dangers
and the hard work of constructing a life that
is not a passive vegetable growth
nor a wildly aggressive obsession.
Care is an inescapable given, simply there,
yet care is also an assertion of our very being.
It is compassion, devotion, love for all that is given
and for all parts of each given thing, each being.
Like Atlas, we lift the planet day-by-day,
year-by-year, love without end,
in the Land of Mystery.
In 1952, when I first met Joe Mathews, he was a confrontational seminary professor who sometimes stood on his desk and reached for a sky hook to illustrate that we do not exist in a two-story universe, but rather live down-to-Earth in the here and now. And within this here and now destiny, he taught that human history is not set to go this way or that way. There is no automatic progress or automatic degeneration. We face options present to our freedom. Though there are trends for better and trends for worse, we humans face forks in the road of time where we must choose to determine the course of our own lives and how we are going to participate in bending the course of history. Joe himself found bending the course of history within the then fabrics of doing Christian seminary education to be too confining for him. So, he left a very successful seminary professorship to bend history within an innovative lay-theological study community for college students that was later expanded to also train the general laity and clergy. That structure of work also became too small for his imaginative spirit. He and others founded a religious order of families that grew to about 1100 adults and their children. With a group of these order colleagues, he moved into a Black neighborhood where this new religious order identified with the residents and assisted about two hundred of them with their reformulation of that neglected urban community. He next took these reformulation methods to India, and his colleagues took them to many other places. Along the way he did some extremely deep work on Christian theologizing and on religious practices, including some intense descriptions of profound states consciousness. He died in 1977, still bending history in directions both social and spiritual. His life illustrates for me what it looks like not to hide from our planetary responsibility in the fear of becoming guilty.
Living our essential freedom includes risking the guilt of doing wrong things, things we regret, mistakes we don’t want to make again. The self-condemnation we feel for our serious guilt is a grief that activist humans will experience and will need to handle. But instead of handling guilt with an acceptance of Profound Reality’s forgiveness and a fresh start in greater realism, human beings are easily tempted to handle guilt with some form of determinism. We can falsely theorize that we had to do whatever we did — that some natural or social force made us do it. Some have theorized that everything is determined and that we are just an observer of the flow of time, including our own behaviors. Here is my 21st century definition of that pitfall of falling from freedom into “determinism”:
Determinism: Hiding from the Guilt of our planetary response-ability
Sentimentality
Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of sentimentality:
In the Land of Mystery
there is a Sea of Tranquility,
a place of Rest amidst the wild waters of life.
The waves may be high, our small boat tossed about,
but there we are with a courageous heart.
It is our heart that is courageous.
We are born with this heart.
We do not achieve it.
We can simply rest within our own living heart,
our own courageous heart that opens vulnerably
to every person and all aspects of that person,
to our own self and every aspect of that self,
to life as a whole with all its terrors and joys.
This is a strange Rest, for no storm can end it,
no challenge of life defeat it,
No loss, no death, no horror of being, no fear
can touch our courageous heart.
We live, if we allow ourselves to truly live
on this wild Sea of Everything in the Tranquility
of our own indestructible courageous heart.
To manifest and fully experience this Tranquility,
we only have to give up the creations of our mind
that we have substituted for this ever-present Peace.
We have only to open to the Land of Mystery
flowing with a River of Consciousness
and containing a Mountain of Care.
Here and here alone do we find the Sea of Tranquility.
Here in the Land of Mystery that our mind
cannot comprehend, create, or control,
here beyond our deepest depth or control
is a Sea of Tranquility
in the Land of Mystery
Harriet Tubman was a Black women, a slave on a southern plantation before the Civil War. I was deeply moved by the courage and joy of her life as depicted in Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons. Harriet, while enacting a plan of escape from slavery with her already freed fiancé, found that the plan had been foiled. She chose to find her own way to the north alone, facing danger almost every step of the way. She became a member of the Underground Railroad and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using a network of antislavery activists and safe houses. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage. Her magically intuitive and courageous daring never quit. This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about how an ordinary human being might simply lay down her life of her own free will for the people she loved. She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery as well as their spiritual bondage. She is my model, along with Jesus, of how joy can be found in overcoming the terror of our own death.
Here is my 21st century definition of of the pitfall for our freedom that I will call “sentimentality”:
Sentimentality: Hiding from Joy in the terror of our own personal death
These Four Pitfalls Can be Healed
While the whole human race can seem to be trapped in one or more of these escapes from freedom, the gift of essential freedom that comes with a devotion to Profound Reality is stronger than these four traps. Our natural creation is a powerful righteousness that can accurately reveal the foolishness of all departures from realism. And the strength of our authenticity is greater than the strength of our despair over our real circumstances.
“Rationalism,” “moralism.” “determinism,” and “sentimentalism” are words that we can use to indicate and summarize the millions of ways that human escape, hide, flee, or fight being our essential freedom. Anti-“rationalism” does not mean a contempt for reason, but a resistance to being separated from realism by getting lost in the word-worlds of thinking. Anti-“moralism” does not mean a contempt for the moral structuring of human society, but a resistance to confusing essential freedom with some specific moral righteousness. Anti-“determinism” does not mean a contempt for cause and effect science, but an affirmation of the essential truth of human capacities to bend history. Anti-“sentimentalism” does not mean a contempt for feelings, but a refusal to replace our freedom-driven care with emotional fluff and the personal addictions that have captivated our sentiments.
Holy Spirit
The states of mystery, freedom, care, and tranquility summarized in the four poems above give elaboration to the Christian symbol “Holy Spirit.” The “holiness” in this authentic “esprit” of realistic living manifests as an awe-filled resolve of our essential freedom to affirm the rightness of this Awesome Rightness that is powering our true lives.