After a Prolonged Silence. . .

A human has to know when to speak and when to contemplate. When plans fail and when the world suddenly shows a mysterious and unexpected face, wisdom requires wonder, not words or overt action ~ the activity of meditation suggests itself.

Meditation is a "going within," a retreat from the practical world; to the outsider, one who goes into retreat may appear sickly, wounded, weak. And all of these may be true, in any case. However, it is from this position of weakness and need and intense introversion that one may begin to glimpse truth -- it is in silence, quiet, and humility that truthfulness about the great question that is life shows itself: a stalking tiger, otherwise invisible, emerging from the brush to drink, unaware of the careful observer nearby. A quick flash of shadowed stripes and orange and it is gone.

Others, huntsmen caught up in their dramas and safaris, miss the thing entire, misunderstand the scene, look high and low for what sauntered past them in the high grass at evening. The shaman meanwhile, in his insanity, in the quiet, charmed circle of solitude alone communes with

the thing itself moving by -- for reality is always a "moving by."

****

Since 2008, I have fallen into a relative silence as a thinker. Here and there I emerged to comment on the fragments of sense I managed to seize from the passing senselessness -- making an attempt to scry some sort of pattern in the fragments of previous years. That prolonged period of struggle lasted till February 2011 when I emerged from my dark, magic circle of silence and assembled some of my thoughts into an eBook, "Philosophy and Other Bad Habits," available at Lulu.com.

This is not entirely hucksterism -- though I will admit inserting a commercial into a short essay runs clean against the grain. If you go to the site, though, and look, you will find I am hardly attempting to make a great deal of money from this project. What I am up to is spreading ideas and beginning to lay a foundation for what I intend to say and do next.

My enemies -- and I would suggest yours, too -- are extreme capitalists of a sort, laissez-faire free marketeers, and they run the table at which we all play; they maintain control of the spread of ideas by keeping thinkers not merely silent and contemplative (that happens on its own) but voiceless and without a platform; or what is the same, drowned in a flood of chatter, propaganda, and myths.

In our culture, the selfish have rigged the game -- it becomes impossible to even speak out against the system without participating in it: money enters into all considerations -- not in any sensible way, but as the entire point of all human endevours; the ethics of selfishness is either embraced or else we are forced to lie down with it, whore-like, in order to have the privilege of free speech.

So, even the intellectual, to have a moment to speak, will be forced to appear as a salesman, bag of wares in hand, to beg for a few shekels to keep body and soul together, to support another day of wonder and writing. You will pardon me if I confess there is something filthy in this and that I understand why Socrates never accepted silver for his labors, even to the point of poverty.

But I am no Athenian, nor am I a Socrates, of the heroic cast of a Socrates. I am an intellectual guerrilla and the first thing to go in order to spread ideas and ask questions was too much pride.

I don't own a press. Were I wealthy enough, I would, and I would publish the ideas and thoughts of those who question this and all societies in the name of justice and mercy -- I would talk of moral revolution and raising people from the level of an undifferentiated mass kept ignorant by superstition, lies, and common opinion up to the level of thinking, questioning, historically aware and truly free individuals, ruling themselves by means of civil society, constitutional democracy, recognition of civil and human rights, and economic democracy -- the respect for basic human dignity applied to work and economy.

I won't live to see any of that, not here. But I will, as long as I am able, think, meditate, bring back my small contributions to these ideals in the forms of popular essays and art, illustrations, cartoons. I have no think tank money to prop me up. I have no political organization propaganda money to subsidize my books or get them published, distributed, and artifically jacked up on the best seller lists like Regnery. I have no billionaire benefactors. I am underground, busted, fighting from an unpopular position, pretty much alone.

I don't offer a "product." I offer to share a concrete portion of my life. And, yes, it will cost a couple of dollars to see it. After that, you may pass my eBook around to your poorer or lazier friends as you see fit, if you see fit. I don't mind. I am no prophet, and not much of a propagandist -- I am a philosopher and I see things in my own way from my own perspective in order to encourage others to become and do the same.

But if I am going to speak, I need an audience as assuredly as Socrates needed the Agora.

People like me do not change the world. We change ourselves. And then we share what we discover, hard-won, in the laboratories of existence with others who then choose what, if anything, to do with the ideas. You change the world. I am simply asking for an opportunity to encourage you to do so.

Richard Van Ingram

3 March 2011

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/RVI

On Rumor

On Rumor

A Bandit's Song

A Bandit’s Song
(for You)

The day arrives when all is not enough,
When you’ve run at the fort,
Guns ablaze, only to be met by the Gatling
And the canister shot.

Those are days when you die laughing.

Oh, there’s hole in my chest where my heart
Once slept, locked away from the world –
But I opened the vault to inspect it
Only to find a slip of paper,
Some writing in her gentle hand:
“Eventually.”

There are days when you die laughing.

So I see my destiny, as I saw it yesterday,
And saw it plain the year before –
That a thousand times I’m fated to charge
The mission door
And die on the doorsteps
Before Mercy smiles and unbars the thing.

Yes, I’ll stand inside,
A bandit in the chapel
Where her gentle hand is kept
As in a reliquary, waiting for none but me.

And on that day, I will not laugh at all,
But smile and forget my losing ways;
For there are days you die laughing,
And there are others when the tears pass away.

Richard Van Ingram
14 August 2008

Light & Darkness

"You can wake deep in the night
And find that out of sight
. . . Right under your nose
A revolution grows"
Pete Towshend
"All Shall Be Well"

Dear diary . . .

If I had a diary, I suppose that's how it'd begin. To be sure, there's notebooks and a snowstorm of scrap paper all over my life with little scrawled words of hope and complaint read by none but me and God. And maybe that's why I'm here: to give God something to read in his spare time about life in the deep darkness far from home.

Exile.

Life. Life is exile from home, a home I don't recall.

Little words by a crazy man sent out into a night where he wishes a revolution would grow. Those things -- revolutions -- begin with little words whispered by crazy people to themselves.

What's the difference between whispering them here and whispering them to myself?

The sages teach that it all begins with little words here, logoi, that stir the heavens to move, that call out to the Divine Logos to come down and meet us halfway. We offer up a small spark in the night and The Holy responds with a rushing wind, a conflagration that consumes away the old and replaces it with something better and new.

Crazy, no?

I like to hope for something better and I like to dream of a reality more and different than the one where I've landed. I like to think that, out there, are others looking for the same things, each with their own special and discounted word -- words that never go ignored by the Above and which count for something. I look into the faces of strangers and see exiles, and I read hostile murmurings and hear the baffled language of people who have forgotten their true calling and who do not recall who they truly are.

I hear language about other and self and close my eyes. I hear talk about the divine and the mundane and am filled up with leaden sorrow. I hear of time and eternity and stand amazed.

What if all of these things are just words -- not logoi, but noises, shadows of words? Illusions of meanings?

What if there is no self and no other? When I look into the eyes of the other, what if, from the depths, I see myself? And if I look into myself, what if I am seeing none but the other? And in the blazing spark I feel smouldering inside my confusion and darkness, what if there is no one else but God?

And, so, in the presence of the stranger, what if I do nothing but face the Divine visage, a presence more Holy than an angel?

And so, in all things, what if there is nothing less than God's Own Burning Voice?

Time and eternity -- illusions formed by my own forgetfulness and weakness. Words in the sense of noises that mean nothing because time is in eternity and eternity in time. Both are sides of an unsayable Whole that my finite eyes cannot comprehend, yet my soul knows intimately.

Crazy words on a Saturday night.

What am I looking for? We send out words in hope of more returning, more meanings returning to unfold what we cannot explore alone -- a conversation.

But mostly I whisper to myself. And God, one supposes.

The wise say that each word and each intention creates an angel -- sends out an Angel of Light or an Angel of Darkness -- into the world, and God knows we wrestle with the angels daily.

To speak or not to speak, when the fate of the world is always dependent on what we say and what we hope-- or don't say and don't dare hope?

I broke a sort of oath not to speak publicly where it would probably be read by my fellow townspeople after a year-and-a-half. I wonder at the wisdom or folly of my choice -- or the wisdom in the folly. It brings frustration and sadness because shining a light always casts its shadows, and one always wonders just how strong one's light is when making pronouncements. One wonders if of is shining light or just creating an overabundance of shadow where darkness is already plentiful.

In the end, one is left alone on Saturday nights wondering in sadness because these questions don't really matter to anyone else, and probably can't. Yet . . . .

Something in me wants to speak. My soul, my destiny, what the Greeks used to call the daimon we all have, a peculiar calling and mission from God, prods me. I shut it up largely for a year-and-a-half and it made me unhappy and lonely. I speak and others are angered, but it seems to be what I was supposed to do. But like all angels, we wrestle with it -- I wrestle with it and wonder:

What am I supposed to be doing?

Hoping for a revolution. Doing what crazy men with small words do -- whisper them to God, scribble them everywhere, light and send them out on the wind and hope the flaming whirlwind returns with an answer.

What else is there to do while you're in exile than hope for a glimpse of home everywhere you look?

RVI
26 January 2008

My Letter to the Editor of The Dahlonega Nugget, printed 16 Januray 2008 (unedited version)

(After not writing in my local paper for a year and a half [see my webpage for a detailed explanation], I decided that it was time to attempt to break the silence. The editor was gracious enough to print the letter with some editing -- space is a commodity and my writing tends to consume space. I understand the need for the edit, in other words. But as I have space here, I am going to post the unedited version as it contains some background insights that a reader might find interesting.)

Dear Editor,

I will begin with apologies. This is bad form, but necessary.

I apologize for asking to speak in a forum which no longer wished to print my words as of a year and a half ago. I must beg enough of the community’s – and the editor’s – forgiveness as to tolerate a few more words.

And I apologize to myself for breaking an oath to never ask to speak here again. But there are things more important than pride.

After a year and a half of semi-forced retirement from the life of my birth-community, I have read something here that compels a response. It needs an uncommon response, and my conscience won’t let me rest without doing this.

Mr. James Brady, in a letter of 8 January 2008 entitled, “Tired of people running down our country,” presented ideas worthy of careful consideration.

He begins by asking, “What is wrong with our country?” and this is where I part company with him. The deeper and better question is, “What is wrong with our world?”

Mr. Brady continues: “We too often just let people bad-mouth our country when we should straighten them out. When they start running down our country we should tell them how great America is. If that don’t take care of it, we should make them understand the hard way.” By “the hard way,” he seems to suggest violence. If he wasn’t suggesting violence, more care with the language might be desired in the future.

My own response is to ask a religious question, as many readers here are said to be religious: “When I stand before God Almighty, will He ask me whether I was a good American, or will He wonder if I lived up to the gift of being a human?”

From an ultimate point of view, does my being American increase my worth as a human one iota, and does the fact many people are not Americans decrease their worth one whit?

Being an American, aside from the privileges involved, is also nothing more than an accident of fortune.

Hear me out.

One of the things deeply wrong with this world is that we humans construct barriers – like tribes and nations – that allow us to ignore the truth that, in the depths of our beings, we humans are all children of one and the same Mysterious and Eternal Deity.

We are all daughters and sons, princesses and princes of a Holy and Royal House that was before all others and will be after all others are gone. Our lives are all equally precious, and none of us should ever be made to feel alienated or inferior, treated as less than we truly are.

Ignoring all the artifices fashioned to keep me separate from my brothers and sisters, if I look within myself, I find, behind the darkness of doubt and selfishness and hate, a blazing star: a bright, burning spark of the Divine that belongs to God Himself. It is a perfect and beautiful fire that is God’s and remains close to Him always.

Nothing I or anyone can do will ever mar, diminish, or destroy it. It is pure and inviolable. It is fearless, immune to doubt and depression, envy, hatred, intolerance, death. It burns with love for its fellow creatures and for its Creator and for itself. It would never treat another in a manner it would not be willing to tolerate. I can choose to live by orienting myself to it, or I can wander in darkness and pain.

This part is my humanity, my fate, that which I am asked to live up to. It makes me a person and not a thing. It allows me to creatively bestow value upon all things in the world except other people who are all filled with the same light of this fiery, divine spark. Other people are, as the philosopher Kant said, inherently valuable, due my respect. More than that, others are due even my love.

Not just me and my kin, my community, my state and nation, but all people, even my enemies. Even people who have worked very hard to forget the light, people who have listened to doubt, hate, anger, and the temptation to violence. People who have constructed boundaries and meaningless distinctions between themselves and other people that allow them to pretend their brothers and sisters are inferior, inhuman. People who have been deceived into believing they can beat others into submission with words, fists, and gossip, isolate them, discount them, imprison them, wage war on them eternally.

If saying these things makes me a friend “of America ’s enemies,” I will have to plead that I am only attempting to follow my Savior, Jesus.

If the Christians are right, Jesus was both God and man at the same time. He came here voluntarily to live with us and give us the example of the right way to live, to follow the light in spite of the darkness. He lived here as a stranger, few welcomed Him, many found Him a bother. He said things like, “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head” and “A prophet is not honored in his own land.”

In the end, He was crucified and suffered an excruciating death. Many believe it was His blood being shed that saves the world in some way.

Let me propose this: On the cross, the Christ completed His work, which was to show the right way to live. He did not resist those who hated Him and misunderstood, He did not curse them. He forgave them: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” He showed infinite patience. Being a good Jew, He prayed the Psalms of David as best as He could for comfort, just as He had renewed the teachings of the great Rabbis during His life, exemplifying the spirit of the Law, not merely the letter.

Christians are told that, if He had desired, He could have come down from the cross at any moment. He was, after all, God; thousands of legions of angels were surrounding Him, awaiting the Word He did not utter.

But Christians seem to forget: With that same Word, He could have ended all of this. He could have exacted revenge on those who caused Him harm, those who did not understand, those whose eyes were darkened and deceived by hatred and fear – He could have ended this world and all of us with it, as we are all both light and darkness mixed together, all sometimes filled with anger and hatred and fear. He could have seen only the darkness in us and extinguished the lights – started over again with a new universe.

But He did not. He forgave, He tolerated, He withheld vengeance. He understood something: There are more important things than surviving at any cost. We cannot do anything we wish to others, even our enemies and those we do not like – we must not pretend the ends of our survival and pride excuse any means we see fit to exercise. We must live up to that inner purity that is so easy to forget – it is what gives us value and meaning. It guides and limits our actions. We cannot pretend to be less than we are, and we cannot pretend others are less valuable than they really are.

Even if they have forgotten.

Richard Van Ingram
10 January 2008

(A story by my friend, Orestes Wilkinson, hermit; hand-delivered this morning from his mountain fortress.)

Confessional; or, Even the Dog Has a Creed
by Orestes Wilkinson

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

“To a priest?”

“Yes, of course . . .”

“I think it was 1995. Just before my ex-wife divorced me because I became sick and she realized I’d never have any status or money. And then told my priest I was a bad person or something. I’m not sure.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“I was in the hospital.”

“But later.”

“Well, I was sick. I waited to be visited by someone from the Church – I used to do this for others when I was a Eucharistic Minister.”

“No one came?”

“No one came. No one called. I figured no one cared.”

“Did you ask – ?”

“ – well, no. No, I felt horrible, abandoned. I lost everything – didn’t even feel like getting out of the bed anymore. It was like waking up the day after the Earth ended for a long time, wondering, ‘Now what?’ I’d survived, but why? What was the point? The only purpose I could lay hold of at the beginning was being a father to my son. He was about a year and a half at that time . . .”

“So what did you do?”

“Decided I had to make it up as I went. Figure it out on my own. I waited around for directions from God for awhile, but what I received was a sense of shipwreck. So, being shipwrecked on alien shores, it looked as if I had to stay alive till the rescue came – if it ever came. Which it didn’t . . . or, maybe, that was the rescue, the inspiration to keep moving and create a meaning where I found none. The refusal to just sit down and die.”

“Why didn’t you return to Mother Church?”

“Father, I had a strong sense that I never left Mother Church: Mother Church left me, abandoned me – or Her representatives on Earth did. And then, since my ex-wife divorced me, I was banned from receiving Holy Communion, the thing I valued most in my religion, the place where I met God concretely and from which received some small measure of peace and a sort of orientation. It was a magic beyond magic for me, a mystical union literally beyond words and saying.

“In losing it, I was shut outside with the dogs, as good as dead. Where once I was privileged to serve the altar as a lay minister and had some reason to take my life very seriously, Mother Church forbade me from approaching the altar rail from the other side at all and decided my life was worthless to Her after all. So, like all good, homeless dogs, I set to wandering as I had before my conversion.”

“Where did you go?”

“Where I always wind up – searching for a place where I am welcomed and valued – or just tolerated; searching for truth; searching for a way to live, and looking for who it is, exactly, that God intends for me to be here in this world. In the end, I went to the Episcopal Church because it had room for the wounded and the imperfect, the seeker and questioner, the doubter, the abandoned. I was and am of a different, lower class than my fellow Episcopalians, plagued with poverty at times, illness, given the burden of caring for the sick, teaching the inquisitive, and facing people who genuinely hate me because … well, I don’t always understand it.

“Sometimes it is because I am very different than most people where I am from, a strange person, a person who asks too many questions, thinks too deeply and comes up with answers that don’t square with the majority opinion. And, then, I am stupid enough to share my ideas openly – for this flaw in my character (one of many), my community tells me it is not my community.

“Sometimes it is because my ex-wife hates me deeply, is angered that she ever had anything to do with me, that we have a child together – feels I must be punished and must be made to pay to the last ounce of my ability to do so; that I must be made to feel guilty for each and every transgression, no matter how minute, no matter how distant, no matter how ephemeral, no matter how illusory, that she perceives or recalls or imagines. Largely, I do not grasp why I am supposed to suffer because of my ex-wife’s anger and unhappiness, especially as we are now nearly 13 years out from the divorce and I have done all for my son I have been allowed to do . . . but, truthfully, I understand very little in this world, being but a dog and a fool.

“Anyway – The Episcopal Church decided it would have me, so I went there and made as much of a home as I could, being a perpetual outsider. The people were all good to me, even when it took effort; I think they tended to forgive my being shy and uncomfortable, as I hadn’t spoken to many strangers for years at the time I crossed the threshold the first time, and as my last experience with a church as an adult was what it had been as a child: I was dismissed and devalued. So, there I went, found a good priest and a good community that was as supporting of me as I’d allow it to be, and was confirmed into the Anglican Communion. And, again, was allowed to approach the altar, allowed to approach my Christ Who, in spite of my many faults and hurts and stupidities, welcomed me again into His presence and supped with me.”

“But the Episcopal Church is not the Roman Catholic Church – their rites and beliefs are irregular, the line of succession from the apostles is broken . . .”

“They are a tolerant and good people.”

“But . . .”

“When you threw the dog from your house and would no longer let him eat even the crumbs from beneath the table, you starved him; and when he was sick and you did not care for him, when he was poor and you did not help him, when he was lost and you did not leave the 100 to look for the lost one – he looked for another home. For no good reason he was welcomed at another house, he was cared for, his wounds were bound, he was fed from the Master’s own table freely and gladly, and not the scraps, he was loved and helped as much as his wounded soul could stand it. Any house that does that for someone is the House of God, no matter what name it goes by, no matter the imperfections – especially as it makes no claims to perfection, Father.

“You say the line of succession was broken in that church? I say that what men beak in their bickering and misunderstanding can be made whole with love, and that the Episcopal Church has been made whole by its love for the outcast and the poor, and by its service to truth, its struggle with truth. It is as much part of Mother Church as the one seated at Rome.

“Should every church be wiped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, every Bible burned to a cinder, every Prayer Book made ashes and dust – the next day, when someone helped another person, cared for another for the right reason, when someone struggled with their burdens and their wounds and inclinations to do the easy and wrong thing, when someone struggled to forgive others, not to be better than them, but to help heal them up, whenever someone loved the truth for its own sake and hoped for something better than what we are given – there the Christ would be, where He has been all along. Even if the people doing these things did not call themselves “Christians” or even anything at all.

“Father, I am no longer afraid of names. I am no longer a worshipper of appearances. I am a dog, but I am God’s dog; I am a fool, but I am God’s fool. I think – I hope – God has a place for such as me, that He has mercy for such an outcast and misfit as I am, and I hope He understands there is no way I could repay such a debt. I have nothing to equal it. All I can do is live by the only word I have discovered has any worth at all in this shipwreck life: Try.

“That’s my confession, Father. I apologize for taking up your time.”

And with that, he walked out, back into the world. Back to the hope that makes no sense, the faith that is a form of idiocy, the love that is difficult, because it is real and because it is the hardest path: the path of peace, the path of forgiveness.

The End