Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
March 2, 2014
"Commission" by Ezra Pound
Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.
Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,
Go to the women in suburbs.
Go to the hideously wedded,
Go to them whose failure is concealed,
Go to the unluckily mated,
Go to the bought wife,
Go to the woman entailed.
Go to those who have delicate lust,
Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,
Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;
Go with your edge against this,
Strengthen the subtle cords,
Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.
Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
Be eager to find new evils and new good,
Be against all forms of oppression.
Go to those who are thickened with middle age,
To those who have lost their interest.
Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.
Go out and defy opinion,
Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.
Be against all sorts of mortmain.
Forced to leave without getting his way, the frustrated writer stops in the crowded waiting room, looks around, and says to all of those people who were obviously waiting to see a therapist, and asked, "What if this is as good as it gets?"
The assumption being that anyone sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room is somehow profoundly dissatisfied with life but they were stunned by the suggestion that, in fact, this may be as good as it gets. At what point do you compromise with the universe, pitch your tent, sit down and accept that this is as good as it gets?
A great deal of spiritual guidance teaches us that contentment comes from giving up our desires. Buddhism's noble truths revolve around the belief that all suffering comes from unfulfilled desires and that the way out of suffering is to give up all desires, to empty ourselves of expectations.
In religion as well as in business, there is a popular proverb that says that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Our insistence on perfection sets us up for conflict, failure and disappointment. So there is a certain pervasive wisdom that says, "Yes, this is as good as it gets.....so quit your whining."
Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled, often said that the greatest truths are often expressed in paradox. I just wanted to say that before you decide that I'm either hypocritical or schizophrenic. I don't disagree with the core teachings of Buddhism. My first book was about the spiritual disciplines of Christian monasticism in which I praise the virtue of living life very simply with our appetites under control.
But there is a paradoxical "on the other hand" side of the story. The struggle that took Jack Nicholson's character to his psychiatrist's office in the first place was that his comfortably reclusive life as a successful writer was that he had fallen in love with his waitress at his favorite breakfast diner and everything about that was implausible, impractical and impossibly unworkable for a man who had the kind of OCD issues that he had. He could not possibly hope to have or give someone love when he was as messed up as he was.
Now, over the years I've found a number of fairly creative ways of changing the conversation so that I could talk about Søren Kierkegaard..... this is no exception. If there was a philosopher in the last two centuries who was more of a genius than Kierkegaard, I have no idea who that would have been. But Kierkegaard did one really stupid thing in his life.
He was deeply and hopelessly in love Regine Olson. Kierkegaard studied her, he learned everything about her so that he could fully understand her before he attempted to court her. His approach worked and the two fell madly in love and were engaged to be married.
But Kierkegaard suffered from severe depression and he feared that the pain of his depression, which is what motivated his philosophical writing, would make Regine miserable in married life. So he broke off the engagement, and moved to Berlin for a couple of years so that she could forget about him and he could forget about her.
Sadly, only half of that plan appeared to work. Kierkegaard obsessed about Regine and wrote two pain-riddled books, Either/Or and Repetition, as he tried to work out how he could be in love and still do the work he felt called to do. In the end, he returned to his home in Copenhagen to resume his relationship with Regine, only to discover that she had married another man.
Many years later, after both Kierkegaard and her husband had died, Regine told a magazine reporter that she had never stopped loving Kierkegaard but they were both good Danish Lutherans so the fact that they were in love with one another was never mentioned.
Many of Kierkegaard's books are simply too complex for a normal person to comprehend but his personal journal, which he never expected to be published, was almost entirely unguarded in his self expression. It was in his journal, after the painful realization that he had placed Regine forever beyond his grasp, that he wrote: "To cheat one's self out of love is the greatest deception of which there is no reparation in either time or in eternity." Or to say it another way, to make a compromise with life in which you live without true love is a mistake for which there is no second chance, either in this life or in the next.
It is a sad story but a profound one. The hardest decision Kierkegaard ever faced was the choice between his life as a philosopher or to indulge his heart in true love. He became the most influential philosopher of modern times and yet, in his own journal, he acknowledged that he made the wrong choice. And, in his case, he never chose again. He didn't try to start over with someone else. He had been in love and turned his back on it. If I had lived in 19th century Copenhagen I might have tried to encourage him to join Match.Danish but he died in a very solitary life.
I took for our wisdom text today this little known poem by Ezra Pound that probably would have been much better known if he hadn't become more screwed up than Kierkegaard ever dreamed of being. Odd that a seriously messed up, fascist, anti-Semite could write the most insightful love poem ever but here it is.
Line by line he piles up the crushing imagery of people who have sold themselves short, who have settled for the tepid, the mediocre, the stifling restrictions of bondage to a relationship that robs them of the opportunity of experiencing life more deeply. Defiantly, he calls out to defy all forms of religious and social inhibition that is, he finally says, the hand of death.
Religious and social rules around love relationships are, at a certain level, necessary to encourage stable families and civil harmony but the idealistic passion of Kierkegaard's value of love and Pound's uncompromising voice also deserve a place in the conversation.
That being said, there are very few things that make me as angry as when a married person schedules a counseling appointment with me and they begin by telling me that they are "unhappy." Because that usually implies that it is their partner's fault. Now, there are reasons to be unhappy in marriage.... I apply the four horseman test to these conversations..... I ask, has their been violence, infidelity, child abuse or addiction..... and if not, I don't give much space to the musical beds approach to finding fulfillment.
I'm not saying that there are not other reasons, beyond violence, infidelity, child abuse or addiction to end a relationship but I am saying that happiness, meaning, real love, is not something that you find. You either create it in cooperation with another person or it does not exist. As the great American philosopher, W. C. Fields, advised, "If at first you don't succeed, try again.... Then quit... there is no sense making a fool out of yourself."
My frustration comes in seeing people move so quickly to compromise without ever really trying.
As a single person observing the world of married people I know, I can become deeply frustrated by people who just don't seem to be trying to make their relationship the kind of love that they know that they want. I watch people jockeying around in families, playing power and control games.... Trying to make sure that they are not doing more than their share, that they are not being taken advantage or that they are not losing control of their partner..... all of which is like pouring poison on your own breakfast cereal.
It does take two people to make a relationship work. It cannot be one-sided. Still, a lot of us in the universe of single people would have loved to have had a chance at a healthy relationship, if only there was someone on the other side of the net.
I am not single because I have never had a chance to marry. Getting married is easy enough. But having been married unsuccessfully, I have been resolved never to settle for anything less than the potential of a partnership that could be the sort of thing that poets write about. And I will not trade off the potential of something that is noble, and deep and powerful in order to avoid being simply alone.
And, having been a more than casual observer of the institution of marriage, I have seen how alone you can be while living in shared space. So, when I say to those of you who are married or who live in a domestic partnership, that I believe that it is your spiritual duty to go and "make love" I am not trying to be in any way crass or even sexual.
At least in this context, to "make love" is to do the things that create the real thing. Don't just try to endure marriage. Don't find compromises that just keep you out of divorce court. Don't be so self-involved that all you are doing is posturing and playing power games.
You know the path to the goal that you desire. You know that you have to forgive. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. You have to take the initiative to start a conversation, to listen to them, make them feel safe in your affection, cherished, treasured.....
you know that you can't get to where you want to be if you insist upon carrying your resentments with you. You can't get revenge and true love at the same time.
Is this, in fact, as good as it gets? If not, what do you need to do to make it better, stronger, more joyful, passionate, meaningful and fulfilling? And if you have some clue about how to do that, then, what on earth are you waiting for?
