To Their Own Devices

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This one’s so good that it’s got to be a hoax.  One of the upsides to living under constant surveillance is that a lot of stuff—weird stuff—is caught on camera.  I admit to dipping into Coast to Coast once in a while.  (This, originally radio, show [Coast to Coast AM] was well known for paranormal interests long before Mulder and Scully came along.)  It was there that I learned of a viral video showing devices praying together during the night in Mexico City.  The purported story is that a security guard in a department store came upon electronic devices reciting the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy.  One device seems to be leading the other devices in prayer.  Skeptics have pointed out that this could’ve been programmed in advance as a kind of practical joke on the security guard, but it made me wonder.

I’m no techie.  I can’t even figure out how to get back to podcasting.  I do, however, enjoy the strange stories of electronic “consciousness.”  I use the phrase advisedly since we don’t know what human, animal, and plant consciousness is.  We just know it exists.  I am told, by those who understand tech better than I do, that computers have been discovered “conversing” with each other in a secret language that even their programmers can’t decipher.  And since devices don’t follow our sleep schedules, who knows what they might get up to in the middle of the night when left to their own devices?  Why not hold a prayer service?  The people they surveil all day do such things.  Since the video hit the web not long before Easter, with its late-night services, it kind of makes sense in its own bizarre way.

As I say, this seems to be one of those oddities that is simply too good to be true.  But still, driving along chatting to my family in the car, some voice-recognition software will sometimes join in with a non sequitur.  As if it just wants to do what humans do.  I don’t mean to be creepy here, but it may be that playing Pandora with “artificial intelligence” is dicey when we can’t define biological intelligence.  I’ve said before that AI doesn’t understand God talk.  But if AI is teaching itself by watching what humans post—which is just about everything that humans do—maybe it has learned to recite prayers without understanding the underlying concepts.  Human beings do so all the time.

Let us pray

Six-Hundred and Sixty-Six

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I have to confess to never having read a biography of Aleister Crowley.  I’ve known of him since I was a teenager, however, since you can’t read very much about esoteric stuff without running into his name once in a while.  Crowley was famous for starting the religion called Thelema, revitalizing interest in magick (the additional “k” was to distinguish it from stage magic), and for generally being a bad boy.  In fact, he declared himself the “wickedest man on earth” and liked to be called “the Beast” and loved the number 666.  It was the latter point that caught my attention recently.  In pop culture, 666 really only took off after The Omen.  (Movies often dictate, or at least inform, our religion.)  Crowley, who lived much earlier than the film, saw the marketability of 666 and I wondered how it caught his attention.

Aleister Crowley, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As I recently posted, the end of the world as we know it is a fairly modern construct.  I happened to be reading about Crowley recently and learned that he was raised in the Plymouth Brethren tradition.  (They don’t loudly claim him as a native son, for some reason.)  He is probably the most famous of the Brethren, across all walks of life.  He even earned a place on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The Plymouth Brethren were massively influenced by John Nelson Darby, the inventor of dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is the fairly new Christian belief that time can be divided into ages, or “dispensations,” during which God has a plan already mapped out.  He apparently waited for Darby before letting the rest of the world in on this secret.

Things about Crowley then began to make a little more sense.  His choice to name himself after Darby’s preoccupations adds up.  I haven’t read any biographies so this may be old news, well known among scholars of esoterica.  It nevertheless bears pondering because the religion we teach our kids may have unexpected consequences.  Crowley rejected the Brethren (whose moral predilections were not to his liking, especially as a hot-blooded young man) but the religion influenced him nevertheless.  I wonder if the teachings Crowley received as a child encouraged him to become, in his own mind, the opposite.  Crowley wasn’t “the Beast.”  His precepts included “love is the law” (granted, his version of love was a touch earthier than Christians with whom he’d be raised, but still), not a bad start for an ethical system.  Even the wickedest man on earth believed in the power of love, even if his religion introduced him to 666.

Springing

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Life, for everyone, has difficult times.  Katherine May has a reassuring, but not always cheerful way about her.  She calls troubled times Wintering.  The subtitle of her book explains that it’s about The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  My wife and I read this one together.  It reminded me, in some ways, of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.  In a society vapidly preoccupied with an often shallow happiness, admitting, even pondering the things that are difficult is an act of courage.  May has a disarming way of writing, a humility and self-deprecation that are an antidote to the brazen self-assurance we too often see in the media.  She looks for lessons in her own experiences of pain and loss, and yes, surviving through winter. 

Winter is often a quiet time of reflection.  In our bright, loud, beeping, buzzing world we don’t take much time for such things.  Indeed, capitalism (which is generally not deep, although deeply engrained) doesn’t encourage it.  “The more you can work,” it whispers in your ear, even while sleeping, “the better you’ll feel.”  Winter slows things down.  Makes life a bit harder.  Think of all those days when you just don’t feel like going outside in the cold, snow, and sleet.  When the chill drives you next to the radiator, covered in lap blankets.  When it’s dark most of the time.  Such are good times to think.  As May shows, when you turn a difficult situation around and look at it from different angles, truths about yourself, about life, begin to emerge.  What is it we’re after that keeps us running all the time, dangerously overheating?  We need winter.

The anecdotes here are deeply personal.  This is particularly difficult for a writer because many of us face rejection frequently.  When you’ve poured yourself into a book, blithe casting aside by agents and publishers hurts.  I admire the bravery and the wisdom of writers like May.  She shows that wintering is possible, and that it is followed by spring.  Lives, she notes, are cyclical.  We can find quite a lot of meaning in that.  I often find myself fearing winter.  The heating bills.  The wearing of many layers of clothes for months at a time.  The dark and cloudy days.  Yet a good part of me welcomes the retreat.  I know that, in the cycle of the year with few days off from work, that if I can make it to Halloween, some rest—some wintering—awaits.  And that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Eclipse 2024

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Eclipses.  They’re fully explainable.  Or are they?  Yesterday’s solar eclipse, with totality within driving distance of many Americans, led to an inexplicable need to see it.  April, we’re told, is the cruelest month and upstate New York is known for its “ever-changing skies.”  I admit I was skeptical.  Together with some friends we arranged to meet near the umbra, in Penn Yan, and to drive from there to totality up on Lake Ontario.  As is typical in New York, the day started out fair, with a few high clouds.  It was chilly, but this is April.  Our destination: Fair Haven Beach State Park.  The location was nice; we arrived early and found a good spot.  The clouds, however, were willful and wanted to remind us, like last week’s earthquake, that we’re not really in charge here.

As the day went on—totality for us was 3:20 p.m.—more and more people came into the park.  To its credit, with what must be a limited state budget, it absorbed many eclipse seekers without any trouble.  By 3:00 the cloud cover was heavy-ish.  Our friends had heard a sponsored eclipse speaker, however.  Totality was nothing like even 99%.  This would be of a different magnitude, even with clouds.  I remember three previous eclipses.  One in school with the pin-hole method where you really don’t see anything, one in Wisconsin after teaching one morning at Nashotah House, and the 2017 which I saw in midtown Manhattan.  None of this prepared me for totality.  Around 3:18 it started to look dusky.  We could catch glimpses (but no photos) of the crescent sun.  Within seconds it was completely dark.  It was another of those transcendent earthly things, like the earthquake three days earlier.

Perhaps I’m getting old enough to realize that you can’t really describe such feelings.  Maybe I’m getting sensible enough to understand such things are called ineffable for a reason.  All the planning, worrying, anticipating, was for this moment.  Yes, there were clouds overhead, but the park was full of cheering people.  They too had come here for something extraordinary and to my surprise I found tears in my own eyes.  I captured no photos of stunning clarity, but I had experienced something I’d heard about since childhood but had only glimpsed in the most crude of facsimiles before.  We were able to experience a kind of rebirth that comes only after night.  Conditions weren’t ideal, but are they ever?  And an encounter with the numinous always comes on its own terms.

The sun, hours before being eclipsed

Thinking Thinking

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Something that’s been on my mind (anticipatory pun) lately, has been thought.  More especially, the quality of thought.  We are conscious beings, although we’re not sure what that means.  Beyond a Cartesian self-awareness.  Everyone knows what it is to have times when you’re not thinking clearly.  Or are feeling confused.  Those of us who tend to live quasi-monastically (keeping to a routine, early rising, writing and reading daily before the 9-2-5 routine) notice the ways subtle things can influence the quality of our thinking.  For me, first thing in the morning is the best time.  (Although I must confess that lately I don’t wake up with the crystalline clarity that I have for years, as if sleep is beginning to intrude on my earliest hours.)  Once I’m up and going, though, routine, you’d like to think, would provide the same results.  But it doesn’t.

Photo by Pierre Acobas on Unsplash

I’ve written before how the quality of sleep can affect the quality of awake thinking—something we’ve all known all along.  But even when I have somewhat identical nights (same quality of sleep more than one night in a row), the subtleties of difference in thought persist.  To understand this, you need to realize that I’ve been rising well before the sun for a dozen years now.  I awake to a quiet house and spend a couple, sometimes a few, hours writing and reading.  (It’s how I write my books, as well as this blog.  And my fiction.)  Even on “identical mornings” where the weather’s pretty much the same, and all other factors seem equal, the quality of thought differs.  Sometimes it depends on whether I’m writing fiction or non.  As I transition into my reading time, that can make a difference in the reading experience.  I suppose that’s one reason I value good writing.

We don’t understand consciousness.  Identity is also somewhat negotiable at times.  We’ve all known a family member or friend to act “not like themselves.”  More to the point, to think not like themselves.  We have no real way of understanding thinking itself.  I think about thinking quite a bit, and I marvel at how intensely personal it is.  We may, at our will, keep our thoughts to ourselves (and that’s a good thing, in many circumstances).  Thought, it seems to me, ought to be a very high priority in our academic pursuits.  It’s a powerful thing, capable of more than we’re even presently able to imagine.  And it can differ from day to day.  Do you suppose I wrote this after writing fiction or non?

What Would Ostara Say?

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Easter is an uneven holiday.  In Britain it leads to days off work.  In the US, which prides itself on being religious, it’s business as usual.  Nobody closes for any days surrounding the holiest day of the Christian year.  That irony has always struck me about this season.  Of course, going to college there were breaks in the spring, and at a Christian school, special observances for sacred times.  In seminary it goes without saying.  In my case, working on a doctorate in the UK (an activity with few true breaks), we experienced the British sense of holidays surrounding Easter.  At Nashotah House you simply couldn’t miss it.  In fact, the Triduum was a contest of endurance with late night services and hours and hours in chapel.  Once I was forced into secular life, the shift was blinding.

Capitalism rolls right over Easter without even slowing down.  Who brakes for a Sunday holiday?  I am a believer in significant days.  I write about holiday horror, and holidays in general, because I’m certain of their importance.  The relentless pursuit of gain that is the American way is wearying.  Most everyone I know who isn’t retired is just plain tired.  Tired all the time.  We’re given few pauses and fed many worries.  So much so that resurrection from the dead can feel like something scary indeed.  Will work in the afterlife be as unrelenting as it is in this one?  All of this becomes especially evident to me on years like this one where Easter creeps up on me.  Not a fixed day in the calendar, sometimes you don’t even look up until you’re practically on top of it.

I remember in high school spending practically all day on Good Friday in church.  When working at Ritz Camera (after seminary, trying to stay ahead of student loan payments), managers looked at you funny if you asked for it off.  You see, I need spiritual time to recover from the onslaught of work.  Easter, however, is just another Sunday.  Watched on Zoom, with maybe special music.  If you’re able to be there in person there may be lilies with their distinctive Pascal scent.  Then the next day it’s back to work as usual.  Thinking about Easter always make me think about hearts being where the treasure is located.  When we take treasure too literally, it leads to too much work.  My mind, I fear, is that of a professor, with built in spring break.  And semester breaks.  Not exactly holidays, but unstructured time to catch up on work.  Holy days.

Squeaky Clean?

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A New York Times story, apart from the expected misunderstanding of actual Evangelicals, made me sad.  The article points out that, especially since 2016, “Evangelicals” have taken to soft-core porn, cussing, drinking, and premarital sex.  In other words, Trump has given them license to behave like secular folks while still claiming the name “Evangelical.”  Why should this make me sad?  I lament the loss of place for those who grew up, like me, striving for clean living.  It’s an image—a mirage—rather than a reality, of course.  But still, if conviction holds, you can get pretty close to the ideal.  That vision of life has been occluded by a guy who runs for President because he cares only for himself.  Jesus, on the other hand, was all about caring for others.  Going as far as, if the Gospels are to be believed, sacrificing his own life.

Like fiscal conservatives, such legitimate Evangelicals now have no public voice.  One of only two political parties has become identified with an individual rather than ideals—what used to be called a platform.  I have Republican friends.  I grew up identifying as a Republican.  I also grew up as an Evangelical.  I studiously avoided things like bad language, sex, tobacco, and alcohol.  Even at Evangelical Grove City College I was a bit of an outlier for how seriously I took all these things.  Of course, studying history can be dangerous, particularly for ideologues.  Still, “clean living” had its own virtues.  Those who continue to try to live that way are swimming into a rip tide, it seems.  For some Trump seems like the Second Coming, sans the white horse.  And this, above all, is sad.

There are those who claim, often loudly, that religion is bad.  I agree that when a religion tries to force others to obey its standards it can quickly become evil.  Still, the baby should be left behind when the bathwater’s discarded.  Religion has led to much good in the world.  Hospitals, charities, and yes, “clean living.”  These things, along with retirement homes and affordable apartments for low-earners in their autumn years, are necessary to pick up the slack that the government leaves.  It is cause for sadness that the clean living camp has succumbed to Trump-style hypocrisy.  Heck, religion gave us the word “hypocrisy.”  The standards of classical Evangelicalism are often impossibly high.  If we look at current Evangelical leaders we find many, many skeletons in a house with many closets.  And a wagging finger warning the young, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Balance

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Spring came early this year.  I’m not talking about Punxsutawney Phil, but rather the fact that a leap year shifts the vernal equinox a day forward.  According to experts, spring begins today.  In The Wicker Man (it’s about oh so much more than the movie!) I discuss the seasonal holidays of the Celts.  The vernal equinox was surely known, but the beginning of spring was understood to be Imbolc, around February 2.  Since their summer began on May Day (thus the eponymous Wicker Man), the equinox was halfway through spring.  Modern paganism traces the equinox celebrations back to Ostara.  The day takes its name from the germanic goddess Ēostre, who also gave her name to Easter.  The holidays were intertwined, just as Christmas was entangled with Yule.

I find the equinoxes and solstices times for a spiritual pause.  Sure, there’s the simple astronomical fact of equality of light and dark, but there’s also something more.  Something that feels cosmic and that helps direct our destiny.  From now on there will be more light than dark.  But only for six months.  Even with Daylight Saving Time, our capture of light is of limited duration.  It makes sense to make use of the light while we have it.  Of course, those of us who rise early end up falling asleep before dark, but even so it’s starting to get lighter in the mornings again.  The equinox is a time for reflection.  And like most times for reflection, business doesn’t recognize it as a holiday.  Who ever heard of a holiday on a Tuesday?

The thing about spiritual messages is that they often come to you rather than the other way around.  At certain times, however, conditions are just right for something to break through.  It does require some listening, however.  So today, as nature holds everything in balance, try to take an unrushed moment to ponder.  For some of us it may come before the fury of work tears through our peaceful meditations, while for others it may come with the calm that five o’clock brings.  However we find it, this is a special time because this day is unusual.  It is a time of balance.  We all know how rare such things are in life in a topsy-turvy world.  The earliest flowers are already blooming around here, suggesting that as light increases so will hope greet us, if we watch for it.  The world is full of wonder, and an equinox is a time to look for it.

Using Brains

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I’m old enough to know better.  Here’s a thought.  I recently saw a headline that suggested human brains filter out things like ESP because brains evolved to help us survive.  No matter what you believe about ESP, the idea got me to thinking.  We often act as if our brains are able to determine the Truth (that capital is intentional).  At the same time we don’t understand what consciousness is.  We know that other animals have brains and that the evolution of said organ is to help individuals survive to reproduce.  Some animal species end their existence at that point, but others linger on to wonder.  And I’m wondering if our brains are filters.  Stick with me here: we know that there are stimuli that we can’t perceive that other brains can.  For example, it seems that migrating birds can perceive magnetic fields.  Even if they can’t there are magnetic fields that we perceive only through their effects on objects.  Our brains have no direct access.

Image credit: Andreas Vesalius‘ Fabrica, showing the Base Of The Brain, by user Ancheta Wis

Here’s where it gets spooky.  If our brains filter out things that may hamper us in survival, what if they overzealously teach us not to perceive things that actually exist?  We’re somewhat limited by our “five” senses, no doubt.  We get along okay.  But what of those people who see things that others don’t?  We tend to medicate them or lock them away, but what if their brains have learned how to shut off part of the filter?  Having written a book about demons, naturally they come to mind as a test case.  Or, if you prefer, ghosts.  We tell our children these things aren’t real.  Trust the filter.  Get on with life in “the real world,” right, Cypher?

I didn’t have time to read the article, but I’d experienced a perspective shift.  If our brains are all about gathering information (and in part they clearly are), that’s one thing.  If they are actively filtering things out, well, that’s quite another.  We laud the imagination of children until they become “old enough to know better.”  Do we teach them to shut out what they can actually see, or sense, in order to accept the inevitable, material, adult world?  This idea has startling implications.  As we plunge ahead inventing AI to do our thinking for us, perhaps we’ve left something even more fundamental behind.  Have we lost interest in the Truth?  We may not be able to access it directly, but I wonder if we’re taught to give up without even trying.

First Stories

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I won’t say more than that her first name was Tina.  She lived next door to us in the earliest boyhood home I can remember.  She was a few years older than my brothers and me and, according to my mother, grew into quite the delinquent.  She ended up in jail, I’m told.  Still, even in a childhood full of scarring memories, I remember Tina as being the first person who told me a scary story.  Funny how these things stick with you.  We lived in Franklin, Pennsylvania, a town on the edge of the woods.  Indeed, Venango County is largely wooded and populated by some of the most avid hunters I’ve ever seen.  There were woods across the street from our house, climbing one of those ubiquitous hills that make the area so beautiful.

There was a man in those woods, Tina told us, who’d been kidnapping small boys and cutting out their hearts.  She was telling it as the truth and well over half a century later I remember the fear that story instilled in me.  Of course, Mom told her to stop telling us scary stories.  I was only five or six at the time.  Maybe four.  My path to watching horror movies wasn’t straightforward.  We were a religious family, but taking care of three young boys and an ailing mother with no husband around eats up all your time.  Mom was content to let the television babysit us in the next room at times.  And as late monster boomers, we watched monster movies on Saturday afternoons.  They gave me a cozy feeling.  Things could be worse than not having a father.  Much worse.

After high school I gave up monsters for the Gospel.  Went to college to become a preacher.  I ended up teaching in a seminary and didn’t want my daughter to grow up scared, like I had done.  Then my world collapsed.  Fundamentalists fired me from my first and last full-time teaching position.  I dealt with it by watching horror films.  Perhaps I was reverting to childhood coping strategies.  Over the years, however, I never forgot that story that Tina told us when my brothers and I were little.  It is a scary world out there, and you’ve got to learn that one way or another.  Many people don’t understand my fascination with horror.  In times of trouble, however, we go back to those self-soothing practices that we associate with good feelings.  For some of us it was watching monster movies on Saturday afternoons and knowing things could be worse.  

Brain Exercise

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Why do we read, if not to expand our minds?  I’ve read all of Diana Walsh Pasulka’s previous books but Encounters is mind-blowing.  I feel particularly honored that a scholar of religion has been able to put together so many pieces of a very strange puzzle.  Pasulka’s first book was about Purgatory.  Having grown up Catholic that seems a natural enough choice.  Her second book, American Cosmic, focused on a topic that academics were just starting to address at the time—UFOs.  That book justly earned her acclaim.  Encounters takes a few steps further into the mysteries of being human.  Those who experience UFOs have much in common with people who have other extraordinary encounters.  The profiles in this book will give you pause time and again.

Many of us have felt that the unfortunately successful government strategy of ridicule toward experiencers has been a blanket covering up the truth for too long.  I was interested in UFOs as a child and was unmercifully teased for it.  One of the reasons I was interested was that I learned, when I was about eleven, that my grandfather had been interested as well.  I was only two when he died, so there was no way to learn this personally.  It came through discovering a couple of his books that my mother had kept.  Since she was one of five siblings, it’s difficult to say if he’d had any other books on the subject, but being a reasonable kid, I wondered why this was a forbidden topic.  You could talk about ghosts (at least a little bit) and be considered “normal.”  Mention UFO’s and you’re insane.

When the Navy’s video recordings of UFOs—renamed UAPs—were released in 2019, there was silence in the room for about half an hour.  Serious people began to realize there might be something to this.  Of course, those who’d internalized the ridicule response continued to fall back on it, perhaps as a defense mechanism.  That revelation has allowed, however, serious consideration of what is a very weird phenomenon.  I’ve deliberately avoided saying too much about what Pasulka covers in her book.  As I generally intend when I do this, what I’m hinting is that you should read this book.  You should do so with an open mind.  If you do, you might find yourself thinking in some new ways.  Of course, some will ridicule.  Others, however, may walk away with an expanded perception of reality.

Unusual Places

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I don’t recall how I first learned about Mitch Horowitz’s work.  I read Occult America as soon as I found out about it—it helped as I was transitioning to writing about religious culture (largely through horror films) since there’s a healthy dose of occult in horror.  While still in publishing Mitch agreed to look at Holy Horror before it landed with McFarland.  The thing about my life is that it’s too busy (9-2-5 isn’t a size that fits all) to keep up with writers I find fascinating.  I hadn’t been aware of Horowitz’s continued, and continuing, book writing.  As soon as I saw Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences I ordered a copy.  It brought back to mind the semester break at Nashotah House when I realized that to get anywhere near the truth you need to question and question boldly.  I told my students that if they didn’t challenge their perceptions with reading during semester breaks they were wasting them.

I met Mitch (although we’ve never seen each other in person) through our mutual friend Jeff Kripal.  They both have the courage to question apparent reality and to not stop at the line that the wall of materialism throws up around the pursuit of knowledge.  Uncertain Places is well titled.  Like almost all collections of essays some speak to the reader more than others, but I found myself pausing frequently to consider what I’d just read here.  One thought that keeps recurring is how even someone with a terminal degree can constantly feel like there’s so much more to explore.    Horowitz is a seeker unashamed.  And that also took me back to my past.

Growing up poor, I didn’t have many resources other than my mind to help draw some preliminary conclusions about reality.  Like many red-neck families of the time we had a CB radio and we were each instructed to come up with a “handle.”  I believe it was my mother who suggested “Searcher” to me.  She knew that I would never stop looking.  Uncertain Places is the work of another searcher—one who’s less fearful than I tend to be.  (I’m working on it.)  Reality, it seems clear to me, is far more subtle than most of higher education has taught me that it should be.  We try to make occult scary and demonic but Horowitz is, like yours truly, an historian.  Those of us who explore the history of religion can find ourselves in some pretty unusual, one might say uncertain, places.  And rather than dismiss what we see there, we take a closer look.

Your Mystery

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Few things glaze the eyes of others like somebody else’s genealogy.  That’s not what this is, so unglaze those peepers!  As with most of my posts, there is reflection here and that contemplation applies to just about everyone.  We don’t know our parents very well.  It’s only been when trying to connect the dots for my progenitors that I came to realize just how poverty-stricken that knowledge is.  I could (and did) talk to my mother frequently, until recent days, but even to her my father was a mystery.  I knew he was in the military for at least six years, so I filed a military records request with the National Archives.  You can do this if you’re next-of-kin.  That’s when I learned of the National Personnel Records Center fire of 1973 when at least 16 million records were destroyed.

National Archives fire, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

My father is a mystery to me.  The National Personnel Records request brought back a few hits, all documents partially consumed by fire (for which the administer apologized) that contained just tiny bits of information.  All of this makes me reflect on our limitations in knowing others.  Parents, spouses, children, siblings—they all remain mysterious in some ways.  And some more than others.  We go through life knowing only ourselves, and not even that person fully.  Consciousness brings these things to a new level, but we still really find ourselves bound by our minds.  That’s why, I suspect, some of us keep trying to cram new things in there—wanting to understand others as well as ourselves.  All it takes is a fire in the National Archives to wipe out entire lives.  Or parts of them.

Now that her earthly time has ended, I realize my mother is also a mystery to me.  It will take some time before I can sit down to write out what I knew of her life.  We grow up distracted by our own needs and wants.  Does a baby bird ever wonder at the enormous energy and strain on its parents as they bring food to their open beaks?  Even those of us who write leave gaps—some intentional—in the records of our lives.  Other people are mysteries.  Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we treated them as such?  Instead, we often act as if their roles (store clerk, accountant, electrician) are their lives, their essential selves.  It’s all we can do, I know, to take care of our own lives.  But it would be a more wonderful world if we could see others as doing just the same.

Christmas Silence

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Christmas seems to have come too fast and not fast enough this year.  Like Halloween, it’s one of those long anticipation holidays.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the silence about it.  Not in a Grinch-like way, I hope.  More along the lines of “Silent Night.”  We spend so much of the year—so much of our lives—hustling about, barely having time to think.  Speaking personally, it takes about a week off work just to begin to get to that phase.  I need time to let the daily onslaught of work and capitalism and angst tune down.  There’s a quietness about Christmas that’s profound.  I suppose that’s why I like to spend it with my small family and not feeling obligated to go anywhere.  It’s like those precious moments before sunrise that I experience daily, only all day long.  That’s truly a gift.

The newspapers and internet sites have been summarizing the year for the last couple of weeks.  That always seems premature to me.  I understand why they do it, but Christmas and the days following are some of the very best of the year, and it makes sense to include those along with the stress, darkness, and ugliness that are the daily headlines.  I can’t help but think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.”  Especially this year.  Christmas is for everyone, and the insistence that we make it exclusive (putting Christ back into it) makes it divisive.  Why some people have to be right all the time I don’t know.  I prefer Hamilton Wright Mabie’s take: “Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.”  Simon and Garfunkel are both Jewish and I think they understood “Silent Night” better than many Christians did back in 1966.

I’ve been writing quite a lot about horror movies this year.  The months and days leading up to Christmas have often been difficult ones.  Such movies are therapy.  They can even fit into the beautiful silence of this day.  That’s my hope, anyway.  May this day include enough silence for you.  The rest of the year has no difficulty filling itself with trouble.  We need holidays.  Christmas has always struck me as the most peaceful of them all.  Ministers, and even those of us who never made the cut, tend to be holiday experts.  Those who don’t get caught up in the dogmatism of it all are the most blessed.  Christmas is for everyone.  And may it be peaceful this year.

Morning Reflections

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Morning thoughts are different from evening thoughts.  As we spin recklessly through the blackness of space on this globe, we really have no idea how consciousness works.  We assume, unless some “pathology” is present, that personalities are stable.  But we also think differently at differing times of the day.  I’ve long observed this as the work day progresses.  Anxiety tends to ratchet up during the afternoon, sometimes getting a head start in the morning.  Of course, all of it will depend on whether I slept well and have rebooted properly.  So the person you encounter when you see me will depend on when it is you come calling.  Many people prefer to know someone is coming.  Not only does it give you time to groom for the role you’re going to play, but it also allows you to prepare mentally.

I don’t see many people in the course of a day.  My job is such that I do not regularly have lots of meetings—sometimes going days without any.  During those times the only person I regularly see is my wife.  She’s more aware than most that my morning thoughts are different than my latter-day thoughts.  Those who think of me as a pessimist mostly know the me that’s been awake for several hours.  The morning me is generally optimistic.  And productive.  That cycle for me may begin a few hours before others awake, but it’s characterized by, in a word, inspiration.  The whetstone of a day grinds you down without always making you any sharper.  The problems of work are generally other people’s problems, but without the benefit of seeing them.  And I wonder, at what stage of morning to evening thinking are they?  That changes things.

Thinking is something that is constant.  It doesn’t slow down much, until the afternoon drowsies (with all that that implies—think carefully), but when it picks up again it’s quite different than morning thinking.  I tend to do my writing in the morning.  The freshness is important.  I realize others are on different timetables and at different points in their thinking day.  I wonder how much this has been studied by experts.  Me, I’m an amateur thinker.  I have some formal training in philosophy, but not as much as the professionals do.  I’m more of an experiencer.  An experiencer trying to make sense of life—or to assign it some meaning to help me get through the changes the day inevitably imposes on my thought process.  There’s a reason we appreciate sunrises on this wildly spinning planet, and it has something to do with the way we think in the morning.