Pascale Soleil: faithfulHeretic

Sacred Circles

Sat, 09 Nov 2002 05:03:06 GMT

I feel like the luckiest woman on the planet tonight. For the price of having to get up really early tomorrow (this) morning, I got to hang out with dozens of fabulous women from all sorts of spiritual traditions, attend a wonderful keynote event in the Cathedral, and sign up for two great workshops tomorrow plus a free lunch and dinner. How great is that??? The conference is touching me in tender places; I'm weeping again, in a good way. "All our sorrows are the same." I'm feeling inspired and nourished. We are talking about God and faith, and I am much less alone. Plus, my friend G-, who I haven't spoken to in quite awhile, phoned just now and we had a great conversation. I feel my life has done nothing but improve since I decided to get off the escalator.

Lacrimae rerum

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 01:20:41 GMT

For the last several days I've been feeling unusually sensitive and responsive to circumstances in the world. I've succumbed to tears a few times (not my usual behavior, I assure you). I don't know exactly what's going on, but it's not bad. I think some of it has to do with being more available to feel touched by things, because of the difficult but valuable decisions I've made recently. Some of it is probably the odd combined sensation of stress and release from stress than I'm experiencing. And perhaps some of it has to do with the gradual disappearance from my bloodstream of the medication I'd been taking for over a year. I served at the Healing Rite this past Sunday. It was a wonderful All Saint's service, replete with smells and bells and well-known scripture. There were more people than usual presenting themselves for the Rite, and it seemed to me that the Holy Spirit was especially available. I was, as always, deeply moved by the profession of faith demonstrated by those who come to the chapel. It's a difficult thing to ask for help, to acknowledge the limits of one's own abilities or control, and to entrust one's concerns to God. Of all the things I do in my life, none makes me feel as privileged and as grateful as does serving as a minister of healing. [Update: This happens sometimes. I just received a telephone call from one of the people I prayed with Sunday, who wanted to thank me and tell me about the happy outcome of her medical tests. She sounded apologetic about "dumping all her worries on me." I assured her that she hadn't dumped anything on me, but rather that she had brought her fears and anxieties before the throne of grace. I thanked her for sharing her good news with me and added "Thanks be to God." I know very well how little this has to do with me, and without pushing her away, I wanted to shift the gratitude away from me and direct it where it belongs.]

What he said...

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 06:30:10 GMT

Sainteros has written a fabulous sentence, at the end of an inspiring entry:

Those who treat self-knowledge as though it were self-indulgence not only walk in darkness, they spread their own darkness against the light.

I wish I'd written that, but since I don't have the presence of mind for it, I'm very glad he did.

The Habit of Love

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 02:37:26 GMT

I don't usually quote another person's blog entry almost in entireity, but I wanted to share this note of Aquinas's with you:

It's not words, and it's not events, and it's not retreats, though those are all good things. No, it's about the every day, boring habit of love. If you want to help others be free in love, you don't focus on events, you focus on the every day interior battle to develop a habit of love. Perhaps this is the problem with a spiritual or ecclesial life or ministry that is event-oriented. It can build excitement for a moment, but it cannot build the daily habit of love. Events are easy; they are quantifiable; they can generate "energy." But by themselves they cannot build the habits of heart in which God may find the space and freedom and peace in which to dwell.

At play in the fields of the Lord

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 21:12:46 GMT

This year, the theme of my parish's retreat is "Play." It couldn't be coming at a better time for me. Now all I have to do is figure out how I'm going to pay for it. [Update: Ask and it shall be granted; knock and the door shall be opened. My wonderful church will be subsidizing me for this journey. I am very grateful.]

The Wall

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 04:30:41 GMT

A friend described what sounded like an ideal job ~ a sojourn in a crystal palace filled with brilliant minds who loved to exchange ideas. Academic credentials were not the coin of the realm, but rather the quality of thought and conversation. (Sign me up!) There was, however, one guy who didn't share this particular ethos. The walls of his office were covered with his credentials, citations, and awards. (In DC, some people do the same thing, but they are generally supplemented, or dominated, by pictures of the occupant shaking hands with the powerful.) This practice is called building an "ego wall." The problem with an ego wall is that it becomes a barrier to keep people out. No one talked to this guy. The ego specializes in walls. What walls have I built that should be torn down?

Oh, well, that explains it then...

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 16:45:46 GMT

I'm sorry, but this has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever read:

Creating the perfect Zen garden is now possible, thanks to the work of a team at Kyoto University in Japan. They used computer analysis to study one of the most famous Zen gardens in the world, at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, to discover why it has a calming effect on the hundreds of thousands of visitors who come every year. The researchers found that the seemingly random collection of rocks and moss on this simple gravel rectangle formed the outline of a tree's branches.

Calling Dr. Rorschach, Dr. Rorschach come to the emergency room stat!

The team from Kyoto University used image analysis to calculate the symmetry lines of the minimalist garden. They found that the points halfway between the rocks formed the outline of a tree's branches.

Please note that the diagram used to illustrate the article shows the garden from above ~ infamously a perspective from which NO viewer ever sees it. The notion that abstraction works because it triggers subconscious literal images may (and I emphasize, MAY) have some merit. But this is surely not the way to prove it. In this case, even if you buy the "tree" analysis (which I don't), certainly one could simply say: the human mind finds proportions attractive ~ for example the golden ratio ~ and some trees and some abstract spacing share those proportions. Among other idiocies here, the analysis fails to take into account:

The sand raked into patterns around the rocks.
The relative heights of the rocks.
The colors of sand, rocks, and moss.
The proportion of the garden's enclosure.
The atmosphere of the temple environment.
The cultural reverence of visitor's who are expecting to see something special.

Here's my favorite bit:

The Ryoanji Temple garden was created sometime between the 14th and 16th Centuries by an unknown designer. No explanation was ever provided for the layout of the garden.

HELLOOOOOO! It's a Zen garden! Explanation is precisely and utterly anathema to the whole experience. The goal is not to see trees, symbols, or tigresses, or Chinese ideograms. The idea (if I may even use the term) is to be present, aware, awake, and of beginner's mind. The fact that they were even trying to make "something" out of the "empty space" between the stones shows how wrong-headed the whole undertaking was. Even more ridiculous is the notion that somehow now there's a magic formula for producing Zen Gardens! (Are they claiming to have found "trees" in every Zen garden, or what?) This entire project was an unmitigated waste of CPUs ~ totally misconceived from the very start. The fact that it was apparently published in Nature appalls me. [via BBC News]

Amen, AKMA

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 21:34:53 GMT

AKMA serves up a lucid and compelling description of the nature of his faith. It ends this way:

For me, what's left is a daily effort to respect the actuality of suffering, the improbability of this whole "faith" matter, and the inevitability of my allying myself with the saints, loved ones, teachers, and friends who have shown me Truth. Though not all of them profess Christian faith, and some explicitly disavow it, I have from their insight and wisdom better understood what it is that I can't help believing, the exquisitely (invisibly?) subtle plot line that weaves the multifarious melodies of the world I observe into a peculiar, idiosyncratic, syncopated, sublimely harmonious non-fictional novel in which we all are characters. They have bound me to the Truth they have taught me, ardently as I sometimes wish I could escape, unlikely as it all looks. They have made me a faithful man against all the odds, and against my own (one-time) deliberate intention, and against the currents that draw me away toward the satisfactions of a life lived without the conundrums that my faith continually raises. Against these, and toward a joyous affirmation that whatever I have misunderstood or stated poorly, however I have fumbled or fallen short, whomever I have wronged, my cracked pot jumbled full of goodness and foolishness, aspirations to holiness and addictions to self-indulgence, my smallness cannot diminish the grace and constancy by which the Truth makes the most of what I offer, and brings me along despite myself to share in a peace which passes human understanding.

Periodically I've considered writing some kind of credo for public consumption. Having read this one, which is so eloquent, I'm even more hesitant to try.

Art for Art's Sake?

Sat, 24 Aug 2002 06:11:16 GMT

Leni Riefenstahl is the living, breathing refutation of the proposition that beauty and the good go hand in hand. She was indisputably brilliant at creating gorgeous and effective images, both as a film maker and still photographer. But, as this article in the New York Times makes painfully clear, she had no more moral sense than a turnip (and quite possibly less).

"I don't understand," she said, articulate if shaky here in her light-filled home south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, her clothes neat and her makeup careful. "I didn't do any harm to anyone. What have I ever done? I never intended any harm to anyone." She insists that she was interested only in beauty. "I'm not interested in politics at all," she says. "Politics came to me. Other people wanted to put me into politics." She was fascinated by Hitler, no question, she says, and wrote to him in 1932, asking to meet. "I didn't see a man, erotically attractive," she says. "I saw in him, and it's important, the person who was able to offer work to six million unemployed."

Riefenstahl is 100. She is also the poster girl for the fallacy of equating age and wisdom. This artist lives a long and productive life, and dreams of a peaceful death which she believes will come soon, while the regime she glorified brought the lives of millions to a cruel and premature end. Beauty in the service of evil is a terrible sin. An artist without a moral compass is potentially one of the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Art is serious business.

An explanatory note

Mon, 05 Aug 2002 05:49:49 GMT

I went to a small private high school. The headmaster of the school was a really interesting man (I refer to him in the Wayback Journal as Mr. M). He came from a background of great privilege and single-handedly founded and kept the school financially afloat for thirty years before moving to have it become self-supporting through fundraising. He taught only one subject, Bible class. It was not a religious class, but he felt that every educated person in Western civilization should be familiar with the Bible, both as literature and as a primary philosophical and cultural influence. I have no idea what his own religious beliefs, if any, were or are. In this entry, you'll see me worried about being taken for a "Jesus freak." I was truly a creature of my time. I wish I could find some of the papers I wrote for Bible class. I think I threw them out in the great Pack Rat Purge several years ago (before my involvement with the church). It's too bad. At the end of one of them, I distinctly remember, Mr. M wrote:

Put down your flute, Pascale, and ascend to the pulpit, where the future awaits you!

Can you imagine?! I was flummoxed. (Now, I'm just flattered.)

This made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Tue, 30 Jul 2002 21:03:47 GMT

Sometimes you just read the right thing at the right time. From Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler's book Life Lessons:

There are no mistakes in relationships, everything unfolds the way it's supposed to. From our first encounter with one another to our last good-bye, we are in relationships with each other. We learn through them to see our souls, with their rich topography, and to deliver ourselves to healing. When we let go of our preconceived agendas in loving relationships we set aside questions of whom we will love and for how long. We transcend these limits to find a love that is magical and created by a force greater than us, just for us.

[via Halley's Comment] Update: I sent this in an email to B-. I meant it as a positive comment, to reiterate that I had no regrets. I also think there's something there for him too. But it was not sent in a spirit of criticism. I hope he can read it that way.

A Catholic's Apologia

Fri, 12 Jul 2002 22:26:36 GMT

I expect I'll be reading Garry Wills's Why I am a Catholic. I'm not a Catholic, but I respect Wills's intelligence and am curious to read how he defines his faith. The relationship of a believer (self-defined) to a church (community) is the source both of strength and of stress for those who struggle to reconcile modernity and faith. Whether and/or how to participate in any form of institution, no matter how loosely defined, shapes the experience of worship in basic ways. How much agreement (never mind dogma) must a group share in order to think of themselves as a community? I don't have answers to these questions, but I live with them and feel them to be important.

Moral Courage

Tue, 09 Jul 2002 22:26:20 GMT

How could I say that a would-be suicide bomber demonstrated incredible moral courage? Because at the last minute she changed her mind, decided she could not and should not go through with it ~ not out of cowardice or fear for her life, but because she finally saw that she would be killing innocents. So she refused, and withstood the harrassment and fury of her handlers who tried to force her to carry out her mission. (The fact that she wound up being arrested makes me wonder whether she was turned over by her former comrades.) This I got from a fascinating article in Ha'aretz via Kottke.org. It's worth reading not only for the story of the young woman Arin Ahmed, but also for the contrast with another would-be bomber Rasan Stiti, and the conversation between them and Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. Ben Eliezer's comments after the interviews are also revealing ~ he understands more than he's willing to attest to.

Know Your Supreme Court (or Why We Have a Secular Democracy)

Mon, 08 Jul 2002 18:52:05 GMT

A scary NYTimes article about recent remarks from Chief Justice Antonin Scalia. What I find most appalling as a Christian is how he manages to deform even the Catholic church's teaching on the death penalty (which is pretty clearly ANTI). What I find most appalling as a citizen is that he wants to impose his religious framework on the deliberately secular political world that makes a plurastic society possible. Read, and be afraid. Be very afraid.

A difference that makes a difference?

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 06:53:42 GMT

I am convinced that we are more like our primate cousins, and indeed the rest of the kingdom of life, than we usually care to admit. But if asked what I think the essential difference is between human beings and, say, chimpanzees ~ I'll say that it is only we human beings who pray. Of course I could be wrong about that. Would we recognize the prayers of chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas? In the past we've often had a hard enough time hearing the prayers and seeing the humanity in others of our own species.

One of My Kind

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 03:49:43 GMT

First thing this morning I learned that Rodney O. Lain took his own life over the weekend. He shot himself. The wound was not instantly fatal, and it took a day for him to die. He is survived by his wife. I was stunned. I didn't know Rodney, but I knew Rodney. Through his writing online I had the kind of distant intimacy that we achieve with people whose minds, hearts, and wits we admire from afar, and whose way with words leads us to believe that we know something real about them. He was smart, he was funny, he was capable of genuine outrage, he was a provacateur. He felt like kin, like a member of my tribe. I looked forward to reading what he had to say ~ whether I agreed with it or not. One of the things I didn't know about Rodney (and of course there were many), it turns out, was not only hidden from those of us who knew him at a distance, but also from some of his in-person friends. He had battled depression for a long time. His online circles are filled with voices speaking the anger, regret, and deep sorrow of people who really cared for him who wish they'd known, had at least had a chance to try to help. The world is a less interesting place, a poorer place, a less charming place, a less rich place because Rodney is dead. I never met him, and I wish I had. I grieve for him, and for his wife. May he be received into the loving arms of the benevolent universe and the gracious God in whom he professed faith. For more about Rodney O. Lain: Magnum Mysterium by John Farr Good Night Rodney by Del Miller Rodney O. Lain by Tim Robertson For Rodney by Beth Lock Remembering Rodney by John Martellaro Good-bye, Rodney by Dan Knight In Memory of Rodney O. Lain by Bryan Chaffin Remembering Rodney by Charles W. Moore Mac Observer Forum: Mourning Rodney O. Lain To read some of Rodney, visit his website, or do a Google search on "Rodney O. Lain" or "iBrotha" for things published elsewhere. One last thing. Depression is a deadly disease. I know too many people who have died or nearly died of it. Chances are, you do too. Let's all learn as much as we can about suicide prevention and take care of one another. And if you are in despair, please please please talk to as many people as you can about your pain, and let them help you restore your health and rediscover reasons for living.

Life and Death

Sun, 09 Jun 2002 23:08:56 GMT

Saturday was a completely different kind of rollercoaster ride. At 11 am I attended the funeral service for a priest at my church. She had previously been a seminarian with us, and had returned only a few months ago to be on the clergy staff. She was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer at Easter, and died more quickly than I think anyone expected. I had not intended to go. Although I knew and liked her, I didn't feel a particularly strong personal connection. Then, on Friday, I received a letter sent by our rector, asking parish members to attend. Suddenly I realized that this was as much about my community as it was about the priest herself. Even if I personally wasn't mourning deeply, others were, and our congregation was suffering from this latest blow in a difficult year. So I attended, and was glad that I had. The service was packed, and the liturgy was presided over by our new bishop, assisted by priests from throughout MS-'s life. The sermon was not a eulogy ~ as requested by MS- herself, the preacher preached the gospel. We sang my favorite hymns and I found myself grieving in an unselfconscious way. In his brief comments, our rector said, "One of the things I learned from MS- is that I want to die in the arms of this parish." All I could say to that is "Amen." Standing outside in the columbarium as her ashes were interred, I looked around at the throng and recognized them as my community. I am confident that these are people who would sustain me in extremity, people whose experience of the Spirit is expressed in action through kindness and compassion. At the reception after the service I met a young man, BB-, who moved to Washington on September 11 from New York. He shared his joy at finding this church, and his sense that it was unusual and wonderful to be part of this community. I introduced him to a few of my favorite people as we chatted, and it gave me pleasure to help him know a few more of this diverse crowd. I had intended to go to work then, but after going home and changing, I started to look at the newspaper. My eyes began to swim in my head and I thought I'd take a little nap. It was 2 o'clock. I woke up at 10 pm. Tottered around a bit. Went to bed at 12:30 am and slept until 10 am. The rollercoaster of life evidently took quite a bit out of me.

What Augustine taught me

Sun, 28 Apr 2002 20:45:37 GMT

When I was first investigating whether I could possibly consider becoming a Christian, I started reading some of the classics in the field. Among them was Augustine's Confessions, which I'd somehow managed not to encounter in my various surveys of Western Civilization. In addition to being the story of his own (somewhat problematic) faith journey, the final part of the book is an unfinished exegesis of the Bible. What I didn't expect was to encounter an enthralling intelligence. Written in the 5th Century, this material would run rings around any contemporary fundamentalist (for example) proof-text. My anti-religious bigotry had somehow persuaded me that it wasn't possible to be a believer and an intellectual at the same time. Augustine started the process of convincing me otherwise. I was reminded of this because Garry Wills has written a sarcastic article comparing Augustine's response to scandal with that of America's contemporary cardinals. One of the attributes of Augustine's faith was his belief in the need for honesty and consistency in life and thought. And he was really strict about it too, with himself as with others.

Happy Easter

Sun, 31 Mar 2002 07:01:25 GMT

Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, whatever your tradition, whether you are a skeptic, an agnostic, or an atheist... I wish you joy in this season of renewal. May the light and love that dwell within each of us shine forth and give grace to one another's lives.

Ash Wednesday

Thu, 14 Feb 2002 04:07:25 GMT

Three years ago, I took the first formal steps on a journey I never expected to make. At the beginning of another Lent, I give thanks for the unmerited gifts of grace that have sustained me.

Thu, 17 Jan 2002 05:54:18 GMT

In 1998 I was hired to create a website for St. Columba's Episcopal Church. The diehard agnostic found herself in a faith-based environment where it was safe to explore and I was never prosletyzed. I discovered a church where the intellect was neither despised nor dismissed, where questions were acknowledged and welcomed. My anti-religious-institution prejudices were put sorely to the test. So I decided to see where my exploration might take me.

Thu, 17 Jan 2002 04:35:03 GMT

I wrote this letter a year after my mother's death. Reading it now, more than 4 years later, I realize that my view of my mother has become much more complex and nuanced than I allowed for at that time. But the love remains the same. A little over a year later, I wrote this, thinking of my father.