August | 2022 | contemplativeinquiry

August 28, 2022

EUDAIMONIA: WISDOM AND HAPPINESS

“Aristotle made a crucial distinction between two forms of happiness: Hedonia and Eudaimonia” (1). Hedonia is a transient state of happiness brought about by pleasurable stimuli. Eudaimonia, literally, means the satisfaction of living in harmony with our guardian spirit (daimon in ancient Greek). We can think of it in a similar way, varied according to our specific beliefs and commitments. We can also frame it in terms of fulfilling our true nature, or, more simply, as living with a sense of meaning, purpose and integrity. In any of these senses, eudaimonia allows us to flourish even in the face of adversity. We have made ourselves present to something greater than our own limited existence. I see my contemplative inquiry as a eudaimonic process.

Carolyn Baker (2) says: “Meaning-making is far more than parroting glib slogans like ‘everything happens for a reason’ , or ‘God moves in mysterious ways’. It is the sense that meaning making is not just something I do but is, in fact, part of who I am, and that life is asking me to commit to the task, particularly with regard to all my unwanted and uninvited life experiences”. I began working with Carolyn Baker’s book at the same time as I was reading a novel that, for me, offers a powerful evocation of eudaimonia, beyond conceptual formalism.

In her semi-autobiographical novel Alberta Alone (3) Cora Sandel describes her heroine’s discovery of her vocation as a writer, and of the values that will drive her. Alberta is a young woman who has left her native Norway to live independently in the Paris of the early twentieth century, eking out an existence as an artist’s model and occasional contributor to Norwegian journals on the subject of life in Paris. She lives precariously on the fringes of the creative arts community, without material resources or confidence in her own capacity. She reaches the point of giving up, when on a lonely late winter’s day, she sees unexpected possibilities in some writing she’d played around with but not taken seriously. The moment then comes when, holding “her bundle of papers”, she rests her head on the window sill, beginning to relax in a warm gleam of unexpected February sunshine.

“And something dawned on her. All the pain, all the vain longing, all the disappointed hope, all the anxiety and privation, the sudden numbing blows that result in years going by before one understands what has happened – all this was knowledge of life. Bitter and difficult, exhausting to live through, but the only way to knowledge of herself and others. Success breeds arrogance, adversity understanding. After all misfortune perhaps there always comes a day when one thinks: It was painful, but a kind of liberation all the same; a rent in my ignorance, a membrane split before my eyes. In a kind of mild ecstasy Alberta suddenly whispered up to the sun: Do what you will with me life, but give me understanding, insight and perception”.

(1) Jeremy Lent The Web of Meaning London: Profile Books, 2021 (Cited by Carolyn Baker in Undaunted, below)

(2) Carolyn Baker Undaunted: Living Fiercely into Climate Meltdown in an Authoritarian World Hannacroix, NY: Apocryphile Press, 2022

(3) Cora Sandel Alberta and Freedom London: Peter Owen, 2008 (Peter Owen Modern Classics edition, with a forward by Tracy Chevalier. First English edition 1963. Translated from the Norwegian Alberta og Friheten by Elizabeth Rokken. Original Norwegian publication in 1931.)

August 20, 2022

NORTHWARD MIGRATION

For the last week I have been on Tyneside in North East England. My wife Elaine and I have been considering a northern migration for some while. It is too early to say whether and when this will happen. At the time of writing the prospects look good.

From a Druid perspective this is an opportunity for relationship with a new history and landscape. I enjoy the thought of this, even though I also like the locality I am in.

One aspect will be closer proximity to the sea. The pictures are of Tynemouth and what is left of its priory and castle, bravely facing the North Sea, whilst also overlooking an adjacent beach.

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August 13, 2022

STOPPING FOR THE ANCESTORS

“I remember one morning contemplating a mountain in the early light of dawn. I saw very clearly that not only was I looking at the mountain, but all my ancestors in me were looking at the mountain as well.

“As dawn broke over the mountain peak we admired its beauty together. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. We were free. We needed only to sit there and enjoy the sunrise. Or ancestors may never have had the chance to sit quietly, peacefully, and enjoy the sunrise like that.

“When we can stop the running, all our ancestors can stop at the same time. With the energy of mindfulness and awakening, we can stop on behalf of all our ancestors. It is not the stopping of a separate self alone, but of a whole lineage. As soon as there is stopping, there is happiness. There is peace.” (1)

When Thich Nhat Hanh tells this story, he shows us ‘mindfulness’ as an art of living. He stops, looks at a mountain at dawn. His contemplation becomes a relationship, and the relationship is extended to the ancestors. For him, mindfulness sits together with interbeing, his word for interconnectedness. It is not a personal accomplishment, but the portal to an expanded, more inclusive, experience of life.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a great advocate and teacher of formal sitting meditation. But he didn’t fetishise it. The Mahayana Buddhist world view, and particularly its ethics, mattered more. I once heard a senior Vietnamese follower (also a psychiatrist) say that she was cautious about teaching meditation in Vietnam. She said that even in the 21st century, decades after the Japanese, French, American and Chinese wars, with elements of civil war thrown in, many people in Vietnam are too traumatised to benefit from meditation. What works best is participation in the Buddhist community and its ceremonial life, in a spirit of generosity and compassion. Mindfulness is essentially a value, not a contemplative technique.

I stop for my own ancestors, of both blood and other inheritances. I become aware of holding them in my heart. I let them in as I let in the world around me, and I experience that world with them and for them. We share a brief period of deep peace, and then let it go. For me, it feels mindful, Druidic, and very natural. Something to return to, whenever the moment feels right.

(1) Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Rider, 2017 (Rider is an imprint of Penguin Random House UK)

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August 9, 2022

HADEWIJCH THE BEGUINE

How could I believe this

If I had not found it true?

The soul that wanders in free nakedness

Births all that is and will be,

Participates in ecstasy

In engendering the Son

In creation and re-creation

Of all the worlds.

In sublimest mystery

All words drown.

From: Andrew Harvey (translator) Love is Everything: A Year with Hadewijch of Antwerp: 365 Poems Singapore: Medio Media, 2002 (Forewords by Matthew Fox and Laurence Freeman)

Hadewijch of Antwerp lived in the 13th. century. She was a Beguine, part of a women’s lay order who took no religious vows beyond promising not to marry “as long as they lived as Beguines”. They could leave at any time. For a period, they flourished in the Low Countries, France, and the Rhineland. The only definitely known Beguine community (Beguinage) in England was in Norwich in the 15th. century, well after the time of Hadewijch or indeed the English anchoress Julian. Beguines stressed voluntary poverty (though they could keep their own property), care for the sick, and a life of devotion. They worked in the world, for example in the woollen and silk industries, and in laundries. Leading figures such as Hadewijch also wrote for the wider community and effectively developed their own theology.

Andrew Harvey salutes Hadewijch as “one of the most incandescent and inspired of all Christian mystics” and sees her now as pointing the way to an “evolutionary transformation into embodied divinity” that “our devastating global dark night is both urgently demanding and making possible”. Literate in Latin and French as well as the middle Dutch in which she wrote, Hadewijch was well acquainted with with the literature of Christian mysticism and also the works of the troubadour tradition with its own philosophy of love. She is known to have written 31 letters, 14 visions, 45 poems and stanzas, and 16 poems in couplets, initially circulated in the Flemish lowlands and in the Rhineland.

Hadewijch was influential on the historically better known mystics of the 14th. century – particularly Jan Ruusbroec, who acknowledged her influence in his own work, and probably also Meister Eckhart. But she herself was forgotten by the end of the 15th. century and not rediscovered until the middle of the 19th. It is only in recent decades that she has once more received widespread attention.

The church and society of Hadewijch’s day were at best ambivalent about the Beguines and their relative independence. Hadewijch was able to flourish for a time, but “the intensity of her witness to Christ consciousness aroused bitter opposition from both church clerics and from within her own community”. She may have spent time in prison and possibly lived her last years serving and sleeping as an unpaid helper in a leprosarium.

By the early 14th. century, attitudes had become even harder. The French Beguine Marguerite de Porete was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310, as a ‘relapsed heretic’. In her widely popular book The Mirror of Simple Souls, she had written that “a soul, annihilated in the love of the creator could, and should, grant to nature all that it desires”. Her view was that such a soul could desire nothing but good, and was incapable of sin. But her words were interpreted as an invitation to ignore the moral law, and to suggest that one had no need for the Church and its sacraments or its code of ethics.

In 1311-12, the Council of Vienne attacked the Beguines for their alleged tendency to “dispute and preach about the highest Trinity and the divine essence and introduce opinions contrary to the Catholic faith concerning the articles of faith and the sacraments of the Church”. Although the Beguines continued to function, they became more cautious, more mainstream for their time and more likely to be aligned to other Orders. There were no more influential writers that I am aware of. Their wings had been clipped. They were no longer a threat.

I am drawn to Hadewijch’s writing for its eloquence in evoking profound contemplative experiences. Her spiritual boldness and unswerving commitment earn my deepest respect. She reveals the power in contemplative culture. Though not on the same path as Hadewijch, I am sensitive also to the heartbreaking gender, theological and institutional issues raised by her life and work.

My personal take-away is that innovative spiritual movements, however contemplative and mystical, are also part of the social world. They need to develop supportive communities, however precarious and marginal. They are effectively co-creating new culture, and it needs to be nurtured and protected. They also need to avoid turning entirely inwards and degenerating into cults. The Beguines seem to have got this balance about right, despite the highly repressive conditions of their time. This is a source of inspiration in itself.

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August 4, 2022

THE GATEWAY TO TWILIGHT

High summer becomes late summer, in my world, with a gentle movement into the evening of the year. In the picture above, taken a little after 8 pm, I at first feel, as much as see, a suggestion of muting light. On looking up, the blue of the sky seems influenced by a subtle greying effect that is independent of the clouds. Looking down, the buildings are shadowy and their reflections in the water are set within a gathering darkness.

The picture below was taken at 9 pm on the following day. The grey in the sky owes everything to clouds, whereas the orange and yellow are connected to sunset. The latter is reflected in the water, and electric lighting is now also present. The day is changing, but not yet into night. This is an in-between time, twilight. It is its own, extended moment, quietly shifting in the physical world, profoundly influential in my psychic world.

I feel joy with an edge of melancholy. It is a familiar feeling that stretches deeply into my early life, prior to language, older than memory itself. It seems to come from deep time, and to be pre-personal, not just about ‘me’. I am any finite being, moving from day towards night, from summer towards winter, from life towards death. Having shifted decisively away from the zenith, I find myself, for now, in a beautiful moment. The Gloucester docks provide me with a magical space for walking, standing still, experiencing and recording this time.

Month: August, 2022