Cell-Phone Counseling?

How is the relationship with your phone (or telecommunications device)? I’m discovering this is today’s personal question of impolite society. It is a living thing, almost unto itself, the cell-phone. It connects us in appropriate and inappropriate ways to avowed intimates and new friends, insatiable work environments and long-distance family connected so easily in no other way. It offers connectivity 24/7, which is potential boon for lived interdependence and bane for information-connection gorging. As I’ve gotten interested in what I call “habits of mind”—contemplative, embodied, overwhelmed, consumerist, corporate, whatever—I’ve become aware the cell-phone may be one of the most significant factors shaping our habits of mind today. What is the nature of your relationship with your cell phone? How does this relationship contribute to or detract from your ways of thinking?

My husband’s relationship with his cell phone is probably the healthiest I know. It’s purely a functional device for him. It connects him to his work in bounded ways. It allows him to talk with his family in Minnesota when both they and he are free. But sometimes he forgets where it is, even leaving it at the office by accident. He appreciates its contribution to his work and personal life, and he can leave it wherever he may.

My friends’ relationships with their devices vary as much as they do. Some leave it on the table when we’re having a beer together. Each time it buzzes or lights up, their eyes leave those of whomever they’re talking to just to see if it’s something important. Others keep it in their hands, “just in case.” Each time, an incoming message becomes part of the conversational space somewhere else on the planet.  Others have it within reach while attending to family living, randomly distracted and resourced by it. It’s never been easier to coordinate logistics of multiple family members as it is today, after all. Some friends were constantly connected--to me and to their families--because of a willingness to be tethered to their phones.

Of course, I write about this because my own relationship with a cell phone is so bizarre, completely mental. It buzzes in my pocket and my mind filters through the possibilities of what and who it could be, contacting me. Is it a text? From whom? Work or personal? Or is it an e-mail? On my personal or work-mobile account? A game then begins of whether to wait to see or to go ahead and check it right when it comes. If it’s a text, I look right away. E-mail, I may wait. Unless I’m hoping for a message from an old or a new friend. Then if it is from such a friend, there’s an internalized smile and hopeful anticipation. If it’s an advertisement or not from the one I’ve fixated on for some reason, then there’s a wave of disappointment, even a mental calculation of trustworthiness of connection or relationship. Like I said, completely mental. What waste of time and energy do I spend daily on this mind-mania?

I got my first cell phone about six years ago, when I was beginning a new job, with a new commute, as was my husband. It amazes me to think it was only about six or seven years ago, at most. I became a big-sister figure for two young women, adolescent-age, one of whom taught me how to text. Then another friend and I developed an intense connection, fed in part by immediate access to one another via texts. For a period of years, this seemed a normal state of affairs. But bit by bit, the cell-phone became a bit of a leash, both of mind and of breath. Not responding within minutes became a relational statement, whether of work or personal life. Mental space became conditioned by the technological input about to arrive. Habits of mind became narrower and narrower. Relationships of trust became increasingly distrusted when differences emerged around cell-phone habits.

So why do so many of us tether ourselves to connectivity 24/7? What do we receive in such ways, and what do we give up, whether aware of it or not? For my part, I am aware of a heightened receptivity to internal connections with more people, independent of time, location, profession. I value connection, feeling related or connected to those within and beyond my circle. I love the charge that comes when connection with unexpected, non-geographical friends appears in my cell-phone window. But there’s also a heightened energy of some kind, at least with some. A quiet intimacy, with a nuance of secrecy? An erotic character—sensual, not sexual; enlivening, not attractive? I’m not sure in some cases, and it varies in others. There’s something significant about the cell phone being purely mine, a private device on which I receive messages only I have access to. My e-mail addresses are like that, but a computer differs from a cell phone. Perhaps a cell phone is small enough to become an extension of my own body. A computer is clearly an outside object. In any case, I live into wild permutations of relationship—up and down, inside and out—sometimes with no actual communication or contact with the (then) object of my attention.

Again, I can only speak for my part, but the cell-phone has also challenged my sense of contemplative practice, contemplative values. For every moment of ‘connected-charge’ I receive, I lose peace of mind and clarity of focus for work and life I value. When I am able to disconnect for even two-three hours at a time, I breathe differently. I can sense an opening that reminds me how corralled I feel in being so responsive, so effectively connected with colleagues and even friends I trust. Yet I feel a sense of loss too. As a college friend would say, from time to time, “My inclusion needs are not being met!” When I intentionally disconnect to live into the contemplative path, I feel a loss too.

All I wanted here, I guess, was an avenue to name this phenomenon for myself, perhaps get a better handle on its instigation of monkey minded behaviors. I smile at the ability to have entire relationships with figments of my imagination, and am reminded once again that our experience is intimately connected to our thoughts. I wonder if one day, there will be cell-phone counselors in the future, well-suited and professionally trained to counsel us in our relationships with—lived commitments to—our cell phones…?

For now, I intend to trust the actual conversations I have with folks, face to face, and patiently practice my way into a purely functional relationship with my phone. It could happen. My phone just buzzed and it’ll wait until morning.

Witness More Than Study

Trustworthiness. Ne'emanut, in transliterated Hebrew. No greater gift can be shared. Nothing can be as easily neglected, lost. In some form or other, we seek it most of our lives. It’s the seed of connection, you see: relationship, ease, significance, devotion, love—that Life living between persons willing to hold onto themselves while simultaneously surrendering-in-relation. Unexpectedly, I became aware that ne'emanut had arrived and in a most natural, but suspect, but faithful place: in a belly-laugh, amongst spiritual friends, in the face/memory of radical evil.

Several clarifications before I even try to articulate what I’m learning here. First, like poetry, laughter demurs from any analysis, any critical discourse for understanding. One never comes to understand laughter that way, so it’s foolish to begin there. What follows here is not really about the laughter anyway. It’s much more about what made (makes) the laughter possible, potentially even a harbinger of something holy worth learning, teaching, in today’s challenges. Second, there’s a lot of my own writing now about spiritual friendship and its contours, demands, delights. This is not so much about that either, if only because it infuses everything that is to come but I obviously have lots of words for spiritual friendship. In contrast, I have no words for what I’m receiving here. The distinctive third piece, the one that demonstrates hope’s urgency and gambling’s foolishness, is the threefold belly-laugh with one commonality: the face of Hitler, the unspeakable realities of the Holocaust, the Shoah. Public and civic norms portray such laughter as either insanity’s hold or evil’s victory. One must be either insane to laugh in the face of genocide or so co-opted by evil that human can no longer apply as an accurate adjective.

But this writing wonders aloud about a third option, a middle way, yet to be imagined or articulate. What if ne'emanut is so powerful, so holy, that it creates a previously unimaginable path in which laughter shared in the face of radical evil speaks a life stronger than death? What if trustworthiness grown across irreconcilable difference teaches a way of being fragile but faithful to Life in evil’s hold such that Life ultimately wins? Would that possibility be worth braving society’s gasp of horror to explore laughter in the face of evil?

A safe place to open the possibility comes in the YouTube clip in which a survivor of Hitler’s systemic genocidal machine danced with his family at the gates of Auschwitz, then other death camps. You see an older man with his children, his grandchildren, clearly visiting the museum of remembrance and never again. Instead of the somber attention to this most unspeakable place of death, however, you see them jauntily taunting the specters of death with survival. Not only survival, but thriving—a family, a life, a sense of joie de vivre and laughter. The YouTube audience uproar followed close on the heels of early viewings, of course. To dance on the graves of the millions who had died in the gas chambers? Someone viewing from the outside could easily interpret this survivor and his family’s behaviors in that way. And that is unspeakable, inhuman, to be decried with righteous moral outrage. But what if the interpretation is taunting genocide’s spectre with facts and symbols of one’s survival, one’s life lived fully despite the inevitable and permanent scars of the death camps on one’s psyche and flesh? Which would those prefer for whom Auschwitz became a grave? There is no way of knowing. Both interpretations are true. Both interpretations have their lessons for us as one human community sharing space on one Earth.

The setting and origin for my own explorations here are much more mundane, not nearly as theatrical. A colloquium of scholars exploring Jewish-Christian dialogue in contexts of greater religious pluralism. Repeated welcomes into a Modern Orthodox community of shared observance. Several tables of fellowship and food shared, with eventually all of them Orthodox-supervised kosher. But ultimately, an unintentional felt-contrast (therefore) between the academic study of dialogue and the unruly life of holy relationship across difference. There are some places human beings can go in relationship that are impossible in prose, in study. These places need witness, perhaps more than study.

[to be continued…perhaps J]

The Wilderness of Modern Response

I’m not enjoying the art I expected. What’s even worse, I seem to be responding to modern art. How embarrassing is that?! Even moreso, for a theologian immersed in necessary narratives?! This journey seems to have begun at the Guggenheim in NYC, but the symptoms have reappeared here in D.C.

Meet Lee Ufan, a Japanese-Korean-Parisian artist whose retrospective at the Guggenheim closes in September of this year. The exhibit is entitled Marking Infinity and delivers its viewers upward around the spiral into a Buddhist koan, of sorts. A final series of paintings, unframed, on walls constructed specifically for this viewing so to be destroyed upon exhibition conclusion. Dialogue and the Art of Emptiness. Encounter, invitation, delivery into nothingness of presence. “Works of art can speak, but they are not language as such,” Lee writes. “I sometimes start from the self/language, but I always want to maintain a relationship with the uncertain, unknown world beyond it. I do not want to put the world into words or possess it with my ego but to enter into a relationship with the world that allows me to perceive it.” (“On Infinity,” The Art of Encounter, p. 12). I felt on the edge of tears upon conclusion of my first visit to the museum. I went back with a colleague, glad for the excuse “that she needed to see it.” I have now entered into the world differently, being amidst this man’s work.

Move the frame to D.C. with the expectation that historical monuments and classical narratives will return you to the anticipated? The Flemish and Dutch paintings drew our attentions first, but eventually the Titians were discovered. The ostensible reason for coming to the National Gallery, as it’s nice to be returned to another era’s notions of beauty, re-affirming if so disregarded today. A nice café lunch and “let’s just go see the other wing, since we’re so close.” Three different levels of modern art, with a Rothko that my beloved wanted to see. Fine. A camera at the ready the entire day—flash ‘off’ as museums required—and the memory card fills up at the modern exhibits? Colors, lines, combinations, non-linear or solely linear, non-narrative everything. The artwork cavalierly disdained throughout the rest of my life and that’s the artistry I seem to respond to?

A couple aspects of this seem significant to me, with a moment’s peace and quiet reflection. I don’t know my own tastes in art as well as I thought I did. Vermeer, John Singer Sargent, Caspar David Friedrich, and more—most, if not all, with a high sense of narrative, play of light, classical-esque (if not categorically classical). These are my standby’s of artistic preference. So how is it that I find myself responding to works with little to no narrative, little play of light upon landscapes, little comprehensible facets to me at all? I would not have found entrance in, in the same way, if there’d not been the audio-tour, explaining it all to me. So…I guess there are some articulate dimensions, not overtly with the art itself? In the offered commentary? Yes and no, though mostly no. There was something about being on the rampart, up the ramp, breathing into large spaces with indeterminate storylines. The commentary is helping my mind, but the bodily response was sure, almost regardless.

A second aspect that strikes me is the nature of response. I’m bemused because it makes no sense to me at all yet I cannot seem to deny the significance. That’s new. Something in me pushed into a second viewing of the Guggenheim. Something in me today soaked images into camera memory, for evidence and reminder later. So what in me is responding? B’s emotion was palpable at the Rothko, for instance. “My dreams sound like that,” he said, pointing to a large canvas of blues, greens, blacks. My heart and spirit respond to him easily enough. But that response is easy to articulate within terms of our narrative, my sense of him. To what am I responding with artwork I do not understand, with pieces I have had no story with at all?

Lee Ufan’s writings are helping me with a little bit of language, even though the irony is strong in trying to speak of it here. “I do not want to put the world into words or possess it with my ego but to enter into a relationship with the world that allows me to perceive it,” he says. He describes his work as an expression of curiosity and an exploration of infinity. “Infinity begins with the self but is only manifested fully when connected with something beyond the self.” Perhaps there’s something deeply conceptual within me that responds to the ‘unfinished’ or ‘non-narrative’ energies of these artists who need me to perceive, finish the work within my own awareness? His pairing of infinite concern and released ego resonates deeply. Attracts, even, with a Buddhist smile. Maybe the work is helping me practice “beginning with myself” but living a life manifested fully when connected with something beyond the self. A world or companions who allow me to perceive them?

So we only know infinity when we are welcomed in, when we see the graced energies of others…in connection with the world beyond us…? I am in love with infinity, somehow. Who knows?!

I must simply enjoy the smile, I guess: a professional theologian, steeped in the necessary narratives of faith community and institutional life, now breathes best in modern art she cannot explain. 

Mid-Section Blues - 2

Those of us who truck in words wait for them. One’s mindstream and physical experience in the world depends, in this instance, upon the articulation and communication of words—with self and with others. Is not that strange? I don’t think life is like that for some of us, perhaps most of us. 

Maybe this time in my life is one in which a different kind of writing is being born—or borne—but I simultaneously find myself fascinated by the potential of living life differently, anew, more in the body. This strange pairing seems to be linked somehow—different kind of word-ing and felt-invitation into living in my world through the core. In other words, the longitudinal experiment of being mindful through the core (admittedly not very longitudinal yet, only a week old) is offering some good vacation-reunion fodder for body-awareness, then thought, inevitably for words.  I am me, after all.

I’m wrestling most with displacement. My life and love means, for now, a time of transition. New sights, new beds, new foods, everything to be navigated and decided. Part of that is exhausting and dissociative of my own body-rhythms. But a simple attention to 5-minutes yoga-flow, a bit of body-resistance training while awaiting the shower grounds me. There is a vibrancy in the core I cannot explain or seem to create, but for getting “out of my mind.” I wish I knew how it ‘worked’ but part of the gift seems to be not knowing. For now.

I also sense now that the ‘mid-section blues’ of such long duration—this consistent ambivalence, even self-loathing, that centers for me in the abdomen—has been an obstacle to even engaging a consistent morning body-practice. If you only feel negativity there, then it’s hard to face it or get your mind there, right? But once faced-down, the energy and grounding seem to arise, inexplicably. So how to maintain the morning-flow long enough for it to become a habit? Write about it, for one. J State the intention where it is for me but where it might actually be received too.

I continue to grow into strength of posture, though it is still too rare and intermittent in my awareness for preference. Perhaps patience will be a side-effect here too.  Interestingly, as I learn to rest into my own physicality, just as it is, I think I’m becoming more accepting of others’ physicality as well. Instead of an implicit fear of overweightedness, etc., I’m noticing people’s eyes, no matter their form.

That’s it for now. More as the week progresses. And after morning practice each day, she says with an optimism born of anticipation.

Flavors of Devotion?

Is it feasible to have flavors of devotion? Different manifestations or expressions of what some call this ‘heart’ of the path, even as each ‘flavor’ connotes the singular phenomenon (we name with the word) devotion? My first response to this is “Of course. There will be as many flavors of devotion as there are persons who receive it.” As physicists identify light to be both particle and wave, so devotion would have to have pointed flavor and continuous flow. But my second wrestling comes close on the heels of the facile first. When something manifests with infinite diversity, why do we try to name it with a unified whole of a referent or word? Of course, the pugnacious of us will then say, “Isn’t God infinitely manifest and yet One?” I’m not being pugnacious here, however. Just ponderous and curious.

In my own awareness of it, the sensation of devotion does overwhelm categories even as it is inexplicably intimate, unique. It therefore seems to encourage differentiation from any description one offers while it continuously invites you into practice, into the lived worlds of real people.  If I think of the different ‘fields’ of devotion operative in my life, there are distinctive ‘signatures’ to each. I yet recognize some similarity in each that encourages me to put them all within my reflections on devotion. It would be a truism to say that that similarity is ‘me,’ because of course that’s the case. But some relationships with the ‘me’ in my life teach me about devotion while others do not seem to (yet).  So what is the similarity yet differentiation at play here?

One obvious similarity is that those within the sensations of devotion come into my mental awareness and practice regularly. In a regular sitting practice—which, for me, is best described by ‘centering prayer’ or a surrender-practice within a strand of ‘calm abiding’—images or awareness of their presence arises, and these are received as gift before being released with a smile. Or I catch myself thinking of them in random moments throughout a day completely unrelated to them or shared activities. There is an embodied or felt-connection of thanksgiving for them, for my knowing them, for the ways in which they live into the world. In this way, those with whom I share a sense of devotion create a web-of-awareness within my lived experience, whether I have any contact with them in near past, conscious present, or anticipated future. When they do come into my practice, I guess I practice a version of “holding persons ‘in the Light’” or devoting energies in their name outward for good in the world.  I’ve never been one for intercessory prayer but this kind of awareness-in-practice is as close as I can get to the Christianized meaning of that phrase. When there is no actually shared practice with them, or awareness of them does not arise in my own practice, then the sensations of devotion do seem to lessen. The connection between awareness and practice therefore seems significant to ‘flavor’ and ‘continuity.’

Yet the relationship between devotion and practice is a tricky thing. I used to think that as devotion lessened, then something was wrong with the practice or there was infidelity at play with the relationship. Overwhelming confirmation has come that this is not the case at all. Sometimes it’s the conclusion of the relationship that sparks devotion outward in new ways. We never create our relationships anyway, so how can one of us be wholly responsible for when relationships change? Yet there is a connection between devotion and practice that somehow facilitates both the point-sensations and the continuity of flow within webs of relationship. Each of us is responsible to practice, to open to the day’s gifts (whatever they may be), and surrender felt-connections as tenuous-longlived gifts of the day.

So be it. For today, anyway.