A Race Waiting to Be Born

'In an infinite and eternal universe, the point is, anything is possible'

- Stanley Kubrick

'2001: A Space Odyssey' is one of those films that leaves me wondering if there's any point.  To watching, I mean.  Well, to watching other films, really; because '2001' is such a rich cinematic and theological experience you can't imagine anything else coming close to its visual richness, aural shock, and emotional heft.

I spent this afternoon watching the Blu-Ray (the best advertisment for Hi-Def I've yet seen) with the sound LOUD; and found myself enveloped by a familiar experience that managed also to feel strange, as if I'd never actually seen it before.

Apes.  Monolith.  Bones.  Violence as a way of life.  Exploration.  Mutual suspicion among human beings.  Love between family members and friends.  Monolith.  Noise.  More exploration.  Bad computer.  Violence as a way of life.  Very bad computer.  Shut down.  More exploration.  Invitation.  Journey.  Shattered Glass.  Re-birth.  Everything.

When David Bowman (I think we can assume his name is supposed to evoke both primal humanity and the repentant warrior known in the Bible as 'friend of God')  allows himself to be transported into his race's future, he is dying in much the same way as a caterpillar dies.  It's inevitable.  It's inevitable.  It's inevitable.  He knows it.  But some Thing tells him it's going to be ok.  Now, I'm the first to admit that applying the work 'ok' to the re-birth of the human race that climaxes '2001' is, at the very least, an understatement (of the kind that Professor Floyd is faced with early in the movie when one of his colleagues expresses the hope that his speech - about the threatened imminent destruction of the human race - could have been a 'morale booster').  But I'm so overwhelmed by the experience of seeing the film again that it seems impossible to know what the right word would be.  Evolution?  Revolution?  Redemption?

These words are too small; or their meaning has been lost through over-use.  Same with the kind of superlatives that we like to use to describe movies we like a lot ('the greatest').  But my purpose in writing is not to encourage you to agree with me; or to be impressed with the fact that I can come up with nice words (or disappointed in my failure to do so).  I want you to watch the film  Or maybe I want to feel that my love for it is somehow connected to it; as if such a thing were possible, given that I wasn't even born when it was made.  I'm running out of ways to say what I want to.  So I'll stop.  Instead of wasting your time with a defense of what I feel, let me risk just reducing it to one statement:

I think that, in dealing with the most profound questions of our existence, '2001: A Space Odyssey' is the most optimistic film ever made.

You are, of course, free to make what you want of that statement.  But I'm so excited by what I've just seen, for the tenth or twentieth time, that I really had to tell someone.  Hope you have a great weekend.

Disappearance/Re-appearance

My friend Jamie Moffett is currently editing his new documentary about the legacy of the El Salvadoran civil war; it looks like his film is going to be a genuine work of discovery, rather than one of this non-fiction movies where everything seems decided in advance.  Philadelphia's City Paper printed a story today about one of the unexpected and tragic stories the film-makers want to bring to our attention: the murder of Gustavo Marcelo Rivera Moreno, a teacher and community activist, whose disapperance and horrific death are associated with the people's attempts at opposing the destruction of the land by mining operations. 'Return to El Salvador' asks why 700 Salvadorans leave their country every day; and aims to remind audiences why the fate of these people is intimately bound to the recent history of the United States and its people.  We'll be able to see the film in November.  For now, the hope is that US politicians will be willing to support an investigation into Rivera's death.  If you believe that we should take responsibility for the misdeeds of our predecessors, then it's clear that we owe the people of El Salvador something more than we've been prepared to grant before now.  But I imagine that most of us don't know much about this recent history; never mind what's happening in El Salvador today.  Disappearance doesn't just apply to the physical removal and killing of human beings; for we're very good at hiding from ourselves the truth about our own complicity in the suffering of others.

We've been very good at 'disappearing' the murky parts of our own history; but denying the fact of the role played by the Reagan administration and others in destabilising Central American nations will not get us any closer to preventing the disappearance of more people like Gustavo Marcelo Rivera Moreno; nor in honouring the people he was trying to help. Hopefully 'Return to El Salvador' will contribute to a renewed engagement with these questions; questions that should never go away until they are answered.

(If you want to read more, Walter Lafeber's 'Inevitable Revolutions' is a good way in to understanding how and some of the reasons why successive US administrations have kept Central America in a state of dependency; and Don Shriver's extraordinary 'Honest Patriots' cuts to the heart of how we should face our own country's past.)

Skins

From Meister Eckhart: “A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul.  Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you. Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk."

Caution: we shouldn't assume we know what Meister Eckhart meant by 'God' - John Caputo evokes this in referring to God as 'the event'; but all language about God, we must assume, is inadequate.  So, at the risk of editing Meister Eckhart for my own purposes, let me say that I'm not sure what he meant either, but I'm pretty sure he's right when he says that we have wandered from where things work better.  And I know I have several skins that need to be shed.

Someone with a long history of courageous spiritual activism, mystical presence, and religious discipline once said to me that 'the spiritual journey with Jesus is a motherf*****'.  She's a person who knows.  Shedding the skins that cover who I really am, or really want to be (and bearing in mind that sometimes my interpretation of who I really want to be is pretty well hidden under one of my many skins), is a battle not unlike the pain of growing teeth for the first time.  Moving into a new space means leaving an old one behind; opening oneself to the possibility of change for the sake of becoming more human isn't a walk in the park.  The spiritual walk with anyone is a motherf*****.

I've got to head out in a couple of minutes and am trying to find a way to end this post - I'm in two minds about even putting it up, but something in me tells me I should.  The need for caveats and clarifications has the potential to overwhelm the desire to write something meaningful - gotta explain what I mean by 'God', or what I mean by 'skin', or what I mean by 'motherf*****'... And I can't.  I'm not sure how much good it would do if I could - because anyone reading is going to bring their own interpretation to all of this anyway.  So let me just say this: whatever you think about God's Being or otherwise, the notion that Meister Eckhart advanced that we should 'do what we do if we were most secure in love' probably isn't a bad lens through which to view your life today.  I'm in LA right now; and so am about to step out the door into a city of busy traffic, rampant commercialism, and some of the most oppressive opportunities to compare oneself unfavourably to everyone you meet.  I'm not feeling particularly secure.  But in my imagination, something else is possible.

This Week

I've had a lot of feedback about my Naked post; and am happy that it has provoked some conversation.  I'll write more on this theme in the future - please feel free to post comments with suggestions or questions for what you'd like me to explore.  I'm particularly interested in writing about the interaction between spirituality and sexuality; along with the kinds of questions Michael Pollan and others are asking about our relationship to food and psychology. This week I'm in LA til mid-week, speaking yesterday at All Saints Beverly Hills and Risenchurch Santa Monica.  We had some fun talking about spirituality and the body; and today I'm trying to get some writing done before seeing 'The Hurt Locker'.  Kathryn Bigelow's film is being cited as her best  (which is seductive, given that 'Point Break' does what it's trying to do better than most other films of its kind; and that 'Strange Days' took cybertechnology and crime seriously before it became the cliched trope of a hundred bad movies), and one of the tensest experience you could have a in a cinema (which is why I've avoided seeing it yet, not being sure that I'm in the right headspace for a war film whose reputation is built on being the most realistic depiction of combat horror realised for the screen).  But I plan to see it this afternoon; and I'll post about it here; we'll talk about it on The Film Talk soon.

Naked

“Your principal concern appears to be that the Creator of the universe will take offence at something people do while naked.  This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.” – Sam Harris, ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’

“How beautiful you are, my darling!  Oh, how beautiful!... Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon; your mouth is lovely… Your two breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies.… Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride; milk and honey are under your tongue.  The fragrance of your garments is like that of Lebanon.… You are a garden fountain, a well of flowing water streaming down from Lebanon.

Awake, north wind, and come, south wind! Blow on my garden that its fragrance may spread abroad. Let my lover come into his garden and taste its choice fruits.” – Song of Solomon

‘I often think that the Church is totally untrustable in the area of eros.’ – John O’Donohue

‘Cultures that are repressed will be awful at f***ing.  They will decline.  And when they decline because they are awful at f***ing, they will create pornography, experience an epidemic of promiscuity, and cause wars.’ – Dorian Pankowitz, the man who introduced surfing to Israel, paraphrased (but only slightly)

Standing naked on a Costa Rica beach three Mondays ago around midnight, and a few minutes later being flung under and above and through water by tropical surf, as the moon stared down, oblivious to my body, or generous in its refusal to notice, it occurred to me that being naked on a beach in Costa Rica was exactly where I wanted to be.  As if there were nowhere else that I actually could be.  And when I say ‘I’, I mean something more full than my superficial sentiments about vacations and what you should do with them.  I mean something closer to my fullest interpretation of what I really am – a human being, made, if God exists, in the image of God; privileged, to be at a wedding in Costa Rica (although the guests had left by the time I went skinny-dipping); and with the possibility of significant change, just by standing naked on a beach under the moon.

Now the fact is that writing this seems unwise; that some readers may be offended by my nakedness, even though I’m only talking about it, rather than showing it off.  The fact that I have had to censor the f-word in one of the quotations above is part of this same continuum: we can't say the word in certain places for certain reasons, not least of which is the fact that it signals how afraid we are of our bodies.  But surely telling a story about how liberated I felt under the moon when I was naked can hardly be called exhibitionism?  I felt united with the sea – like I belonged there; like the earth was my home; like I fitted in my body.

It wasn’t a miracle; it wasn’t a transfiguration; and perhaps I'm the only person in the world who ever felt disconnected, or even a little dislocated from my physical frame; so this may mean absolutely nothing to anyone else reading.  If I were a poet, I could say this better - so if I'm de-railing your interest, please forgive me and come back later.  But if you're still with me, let me say this:  I found myself waking up a little bit more to the fact of my own body – that whatever else is going on in the world, I have nowhere else to be except in my body.  That’s where I happen.  Not just my fuelling-and-emptying; or my experience of sexuality; or work or play: but ME.  My body is where I happen.  It seems to me that Sam Harris is more right than he knows – it’s not just religious institutions that can turn the body into a site of oppression: for our entire culture may be obsessed with it.  The beauty myth forced on us by media and cultural mavens deadens the soul on the one hand; but on the other, the denial of the body still present in so much of our religious and educational systems detaches us from our very selves.  We wander round in bodies that we don’t like because someone else has told us that we don’t look ‘right’;  as if it were possible for six billion people’s hopes to be reduced to our potential to emulate the cheek bone structure of the rich and famous.

This may be turning into a rant, so I'll try to give it a soft landing.  I'm not sure that there's much more to what I want to say than the fact that I was naked on a beach in Costa Rica and it made me feel more alive than I was before.  But if there is something more, it is this:

I have nowhere else to be except in my body. Nothing happens to, or with, or through me apart from my body.  Yet even though we tell ourselves that we have left the dualism that divides physicality and spirituality behind, it's pretty clear that the competition for how we treat our bodies is still unsettled.  I need to tell myself that my body and I are better suited to befriending each other than denying who we are together.  I have a strong suspicion that the feeling of integration I had while naked on a beach in Costa Rica, while not denying the fact that some things are special because they're unrepeatable, isn't supposed to be the exception, but the rule.  I'm just not sure how to replicate it when I'm not on holiday.  But I know that, in the tension between being and becoming that I'm beginning to understand life to be, I want to.

*Photo credit: www.richarddawkins.net