Westworld Then and Now

Science Fiction as a genre has always explored what it means to be human in light of an unknown other. The aliens, monsters, and technologies serve as examinations into our own being and psyche. Our explorations of other worlds provide traveling space to study life in this world. In 1973, Michael Crichton鈥檚 film Westworld inhabited imaginations entering a technological age. His script even gave us the term 鈥渃omputer virus鈥� when personal computers were not even a prototype. As actor Yul Brynner proved even a slow chase could be terrifying, Crichton posed questions about human desire and hubris, the controllability of technology, and the nature of reality.

Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have been translating Crichton鈥檚 work into a cinematic saga that is a contemporary meditation on the nature of free will, consciousness, and the thin line between humanity and its technological creations. The show鈥檚 themes and imagery are both brilliant and brutal as they deconstruct the darkness of human psyche acted out violently against robot hosts deemed sub-human while tracking their bid for consciousness. All the while, the questions persist: What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of consciousness and personhood?

Consciousness

Within the first two seasons Westworld鈥檚 narrative arches with the question, can robot hosts have consciousness? Without spoiling the plot, the creators use the hosts to explore three key principles of consciousness:

• First, we need relationships and conversation with other minds in order to become ourselves. There is no self in static isolation.
• Secondly, our freedom of choice facilitates awakening and the fluid process of our becoming. Breaking out of programed loops for humans and hosts alike is the foundation of freedom.
• Thirdly, the capacity for memory is at the center of how we build a narrative of self, relate to others, and anticipate the future. In other words, to decide who one will become, one must first bear the weight of what has happened to them.

Philosopher Brian King would likely add a fourth principle that perhaps distinguishes human consciousness from the proposition of robot consciousness: the element of embodiment. King argues:

We have a 鈥榯heory of mind,鈥� which means we can put ourselves in others鈥� shoes, so to speak. Here perhaps most clearly, our understanding of others is based on our own feelings and intentions, which are in turn based on the requirements of our bodies. It is possible then that our conscious understanding boils down to a kind of biological awareness. In other words, our experiences of our embodied selves and our place in the world provides the templates for all our understanding. So, if there is a link between consciousness and the type of bodies which produce sensations, feelings, and understanding, then a robot must also have that kind of body for it to be conscious.

Westworld certainly takes us right to the edge of compelling embodiment by giving the robot hosts bodies that can engage in relationship and sacrificial acts of love, make choices that shape who they become, remember and give meaning to their past, and feel an embodied sense of place, pleasure, and pain. In my mind the question is still open and I鈥檒l have to wait with everyone else for season three. But in the end, isn鈥檛 the purpose of good storytelling to facilitate large enough questions that we can journey with them without need for a singular or static answer?

Two Theological Anthropologies

For me, the question of consciousness is hinged to the question of self and personhood. Two theological anthropologies come to mind as I delve into Westworld. The first is a model of individual identity that is solitary. Augustine thought of the self as a contained, independent, and self-sufficient being that can be put into communion with others. In other words, we are completely ourselves and then place that self into relationships. The second, and the one I find most compelling, arises from the Cappadocians who understood the self to be relational. In other words, our relationships compose our being. We become our self/selves through relationships.

As feminist theologian, Catherine Mowry LaCugna argues, 鈥淭he radical move of the Cappadocians was to assert that divinity or Godhood originates with personhood (someone toward another), not with substance (something in and of itself). 摆鈥 Thus personhood, being-in-relation-to-another, was secured as the ultimate origination principle of all reality鈥� (LaCugna, 87). LaCugna is suggesting that what it means to be human is that we bear the image of God, and part of that image we reflect is our being-in-relation to people and the earth. There is no personhood, no consciousness without another. In the words of Martin Buber, 鈥淚 require a You to become an I.鈥� How gorgeous is that?

Okay, so perhaps you don鈥檛 watch Westworld with popcorn in one hand and theology and philosophy in the other. That seems normal. All the same, if my education at 天美视频 has taught me anything it is this: My conscious becoming occurs in community. We are beings toward another, and in that interconnectivity and interdependence we bear the vulnerable beauty of the imago Dei. And if that is the case, shouldn鈥檛 it mean a great deal for how we treat one another?

Suggestions for Further Exploration:

Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Charles Scribner鈥檚 Sons, 1970).

Michael Crichton, Westworld, 1973.

Michelle A. Gonzalez, Created in God鈥檚 Image: And Introduction to Feminist Theological Anthropology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007).

Lisa Joy, Johnathan Nolan, et al., Westworld, 2016-present.

Brian King, 鈥淐ould a Robot be Conscious?鈥� in Philosophy Now (Issue 125, April/May 2018).

Catherine Mowry LaCugna, 鈥淕od in Communion with Us: The Trinity,鈥� in Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1993).

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When the house is quiet, the world settled down, my creative mind comes alive and speaks its own language with clarity. Sometimes she speaks late into the night. I am a born and bred night owl, which is to say that I am not a morning person. As a writer, artist, and thinker my ritual keeping of notebooks are my commitment to attend to the world around me and the world within me. This ritual of gathering, at all the muse鈥檚 hours, provides the raw material for the art. It wasn鈥檛 until recently that I turned to my beloved tools of response and ritual to engage my own ambivalence around waking.

We tend to think of rituals as solemn ceremonies, but as human beings our lives are comprised of a modest web of repetition and rhythm. Our words and actions take us places and habitually form the lives we lead. James K. A. Smith in his book, You Are What You Love suggests that as liturgical creatures, our rituals reveal the embodied stories of who we are and they work on our imagination in an aesthetic register. By connecting to the stories we carry, we sense the particular vision of flourishing that governs our being-in-the-world. In other words, what I do repeatedly puts me in touch with what I attend to and thus love.

When I contemplate my own definitions of flourishing and purpose I am haunted by the words of the philosopher S酶ren Kierkegaard. He cautions that, 鈥渟o many live out their lives in quiet lostness; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that life鈥檚 content successively unfolds and is now possessed in the unfolding, but they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows.鈥� One of the treasures of inhabiting my story through my education at 天美视频 and my artistic rituals is that I am constantly figuring out how to remain close to my life. My spiritual tradition informs my sense of flourishing by suggesting that we each have capacity to respond and are thus formed by all our choosing. At their best, rituals, liturgies and practices equip us to attend and participate in that unfolding. Personally, I want to be able to say, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said in his Book of Hours,

摆鈥
I want to unfold.
I don鈥檛 want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.

The intent of my rituals is to remain close to myself and my own unfolding. To import this sense of liturgical formation into a new practice of waking, I fashioned some simple meditative words to locate and stay close to my life as I begin each new day. Before my feet touch the ground, before I brace myself to listen to the news, before I reach for my smartphone, I attempt to reach for these words:

WAKING RITUAL

1. Find Your Breath:
Locate both your inhale and your exhale, for you will need them in equal measure. Breathe deeply.

2. Find Your Body:
Wake your senses. Smell. Touch. Hearing. Taste. Sight. Sense your body and yourself alive within and because of its existence. Thank it for translating the world to you.

3. Find Your Place:
Locate yourself in your room, dwelling, community, city, environment, time, etc. moving in concentrically widening circles of tribe and belonging.

4. Find Your Purpose:
Who are you becoming and what are you going to do today that contributes to why you are here?

5. Find Your God:
Give thanks for everything that woke this morning- breath, body, place, purpose, your beloveds. Pray that your life force will join the work of the Spirit. Bless something in you, so that you may be a blessing to others. Bless something in your beloveds and ask for their protection and their freedom. Ask for something on behalf of the world.

Say amen.
Say, 鈥渕ay it be so,鈥� like it will demand something of you.
Let it send you up out of bed and into the world.

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What does it mean to read? This question has been on my mind as we entered National Poetry Month. In a world where our attention has become the greatest commodity, which voices we choose to listen to in the cacophony is not a neutral act. Much of my own reading is driven by a deep hunger to hear a diversity of other women鈥檚 voices. The root of good writing is good reading. In particular, I gravitate toward women who wield the medium which Audre Lorde once referred to as, 鈥渁 revelation and distillation of experience.鈥� Poetry鈥檚 communication has immediacy that taps into the way we feel, forge memory, and make meaning. As both oral and written art, it has held the human voice throughout the ages with embodied particularity. And yet, there are so many voices and bodies that have not been heard. This art form so defined by active attention has much to teach us about how to listen and the empathetic responsibility we have to hear one another well.

In 1985, poet Audre Lorde wrote a fierce and stunning essay called, 鈥淧oetry is Not a Luxury.鈥� In it, her poetic prose argued that, 鈥淔or women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought.鈥� For Lorde, 鈥減oetry鈥� was a soulful shorthand for an artistic and cultural process of women listening to their lives and finding a form of communication that gave it privilege, shape, identity, and freedom. She saw poetry as having a particular relationship with the ineffable. Where there was wordlessness and namelessness, this art form gave birth to voice, efficacy, and action.

鈥淭he root of good writing is good reading.鈥�

For this very reason, poetry played a huge role throughout the women鈥檚 movement. In his chapter, 鈥淭he Poetical is the Political鈥� T.V. Reed highlights how the movement of the 1960s and 70s used the art form to claim public space and name oppressions and inequalities that were relegated to the realms of the private, the personal, and the 鈥渘on-political.鈥� The foundational act of poetry is to make visible the invisible world. Feminist and Womanist poets addressed the invisibility both of women鈥檚 experiences and the patriarchal systems that went unnamed and invisible to the normative eye. Through poetry, personal experience could become collective experiences, which made way for consciousness raising, theory, activism, and change. The epistemological shift within the movement and the poetry it wielded was to count women鈥檚 lived experiences as knowledge. That knowledge had language and power of presence to deconstruct the binaries of public and private, emotion and reason.

Now as then, poetry is a place of radical resistance. To celebrate one鈥檚 life and its wisdom through art is a kind of protest against systems that undermine and demand its silence. Spoken word and hip-hop artists, poets and storytellers around the world continue in the movement toward women鈥檚 equality by sharing the truth of their experiences in their own voices. What it means to read is to choose to listen. This April, I invite you to listen to contemporary voices of women through this ancient and ever-new art form. Poetry is not a luxury. Listening to the voices of women is not a luxury.

Where to Start: Recommended Reading

This list represents just 25 of my favorite books of poetry by women that have powerfully impacted the way I think, read, and create as a poet. To narrow the list, I chose women who鈥檝e published books of poetry between 2000-2018. I鈥檝e permitted myself exceptions by including newly published volumes of complete works by some of my favorite poets. These voices represent the beautiful intersectionality that we write from as women. Their art diversely navigates nationality, race, sexual orientation, embodiment, age, religion, and class. Some are prolific greats and others are exciting emerging voices. All have robust and prophetic insight from their locatedness in the world. Whether you鈥檙e dipping a toe into poetry or already have a robust practice, may these suggestions help you discover, return to, and share your favorites!

25 Recommended Books of Poetry by Women:
(Selections published between 2000-2018 appear in alphabetical order by last name.)

1. Crave Radiance, Elizabeth Alexander (former US Poet Laureate)
2. Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, edited and compiled by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr. This anthology features work from a variety of poets.
3. Bone, Yrsa Daley-Ward
4. Head Off and Split, Nikky Finney
5. Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gl眉ck (National Book Award Winner)
6. How We Became Human and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Joy Harjo
7. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe
8. Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur
9. B and No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay
10. Inside Out and Back Again, Thanhh脿 L岷 (This is a children鈥檚 Newberry Honor book of poetry about immigrating from Vietnam to Alabama amidst the Vietnam War. It could be a great way to include children in this reading activity.)
11. Whereas, Layli Long Soldier (National Book Award Finalist)
12. The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, Denise Levertov, edited by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey
13. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, Audre Lorde
14. A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Naomi Shihab Nye (This is a great selection to share with children and young adults.) See also Words Under Words, and Red Suitcase
15. Thirst, Mary Oliver
16. The Art of Blessing the Day, Marge Piercy
17. Citizen, Claudia Rankine (Finalist for the National Book Award; .)
18. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog
19. The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Kay Ryan (former US Poet Laureate)
20. Cries of the Spirit, edited by Marilyn Sewell (anthology of 300 poems celebrating women鈥檚 spirituality)
21. Unbearable Splendor, 鞁� 靹� 鞓� Sun Yung Shin
22. Here and Map: Collected and Last Poems, Wis艂awa Szymborshka, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak
23. Thrall and Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey (former US Poet Laureate)
24. Salt and Nejma, Nayyirah Waheed
25. Love Without Limits: The Bi-Laws of Love, Yazmin Monet Watkins

Resources for Further Reading and Engagement with National Poetry Month

Audre Lorde, 鈥淧oetry Is Not A Luxury,鈥� in .
T.V. Reed, 鈥淭he Poetical Is the Political: Feminist Poetry and the Poetics of Women鈥檚 Rights,鈥� in .
Alice Walker, 鈥淪aving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist鈥檚 Life,鈥� in .
Looking for things to do in Seattle to celebrate National Poetry Month? Check out .
Seattle is lucky enough to have a poetry-only bookstore. Check out events or just wander into the sublime .
April 26, 2018 is . Join the national tradition by selecting a favorite and carrying it with you.

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One of the complexities of the human condition is communication: that reach for understanding and to be understood. The trouble is that there is a consistent space between our experience and language to express it. In that gap we reach for images to disclose our ideas and collect our experiences in concentrated form. Enter the metaphor. Though it鈥檚 a stalwart tool of the language arts, it is often an overlooked skillset of negotiating meaning in a variety of environments and relationships. Therapists, theologians, poets and artists all deal in metaphor. As a written image, metaphors are the lingua franca of the indescribable world. It鈥檚 like this. They give us insight not just into what we say, but how we perceive the world and how we think and behave in it.

Language Seeking Understanding
Linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson give a foundational definition in their book, Metaphors We Live By. 鈥淭he essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.鈥� At a basic level, metaphors are devices for understanding through comparison. The invitation is to see A through the lens of B. This is particularly useful in experiences that leave us without adequate words. In the realms of inner experience, whether it be the pains of trauma or the divine presence in the midst, we are left to merely point in the approximate direction of the ineffable. Metaphors evoke our intricate web of imagery and memory that reverberate with the significance of how things connect. They allow us to pair the unknown with the known. This gives rise to the possibility of conveying experience, but also invites us into new experiences and new understanding.

As Aristotle argues in his Poetics, 鈥淭he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor鈥t is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.鈥� The best metaphors don鈥檛 just categorize like with like. Rather, they create interest by holding seemingly dissimilar items in tension. They make the familiar deliciously unfamiliar to us and open us to see it afresh. Theologian Walter Brueggemann looks to biblical poets and prophets who wield metaphor in this way. They speak of God with renewed meaning that opens up rather than closing down the beloved with singular objective terms. The invitation of language is to live with a multiplicity of metaphors. These keep malleable the images we use to relate to and understand the ineffable mystery of the sacred.

Root Metaphors & Mental Models
Metaphors are far more than just ornate language. Lakoff and Johnson argue that since communication is based on a conceptual system, language and metaphor can tell us something about that hidden structure within. In other words, the root metaphors within our narratives reveal a great deal of our mental map of how the world hangs together and what it means. We shape the map, and the map constantly shapes the reality we perceive in return. While some metaphors may convey individual experience, root metaphors get at 鈥渙ur experiential gestalt鈥� that makes our cultural context and values coherent to us. For example, Lakoff and Johnson highlight common Western root metaphors such as, 鈥渢ime is money鈥� and 鈥渁rguments are war.鈥� We begin to see A (time) through the lens of B (economic resource). As you can imagine, this influences greatly not just how we talk about time and dialogue, but how we perceive and relate to it in our behaviors.

Lakoff and Johnson make the case that human thought is largely metaphorical, from the way we approach time to the way we shape rituals, experience aesthetics, perceive politics, and even pursue our own development. They contend that, 鈥淎 large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives. Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of the experience to yourself.鈥� The metaphors we live by, often tacitly, are a very human way that we participate in our own world-making and soul-making. These metaphors are often part of the inheritance of language and culture. The more we come to know the metaphors in our narrative, the more we are equipped to recognize their influence and shape them.

Metamorphosis
Henry M. Seiden has been a poet as long as he鈥檚 been a psychoanalyst and he writes with the audience of practicing therapists and their clients in mind. His gem of a book, The Motive for Metaphor: Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis is a meditation on the interpretive art shared by both poets and therapists. 鈥淢y excitement with poetry,鈥� he writes, 鈥渋s that it makes beauty in a way not so different from the way psychoanalysis makes truth: that is, in discovery, evocation, elaboration, and transformation of meaning. Both arts can make what鈥檚 alive in us more so.鈥� Meaning is made and transformed in the land of metaphor and narrative. The good news is that new metaphors make way for new understanding and new realities that we can live into. This is surely one of the reasons why I write. Perhaps it is why you might be considering being a therapist, a pastor, or a creator of culture. The telos within all this work is to find means of creating new worlds and ways of being.

In the meaning-making ahead of you, may you have therapeutic relationships, dialogues, and art in good measure. And as the resistance might say, metaphors be with you!

Resources Referenced for Further Reading:

• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
• Henry M. Seiden, The Motive for Metaphor: Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis

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As Oscar season is upon us, one nominee has stuck with me like the pang of bruised ribs. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a hauntingly brutal tale depicting a web of characters who rage as they figure out how to live in the ambiguous landscape where justice eludes them and violence is anything but redemptive. They each embody the question, who do you hold accountable when the whole world is on fire? At the center of the dark comedy is Mildred Hayes, played by Frances McDormand, the mother of a young woman whose brutal rape and murder has gone unsolved. In putting up three billboards detailing the murder and singling out the police chief Willoughby, Mildred asks why no arrests have been made and incites the polar responses of empathy and disgust from the community.

Three Billboards is a brilliant cinematic meditation on anger. At times its characters wield it with holy righteousness. At other times its characters鈥� indignation at the changing world is as foul as their ideology. Anger becomes a form of compassionate care that draws a boundary and says, 鈥淣o!鈥� At other times it turns to violence as a response to powerlessness and vulnerability. Mildred provides an important powerhouse embodiment of female anger that rages on behalf of all of us against the systemic sexualized violence that pervades the world. Mildred鈥檚 anger has particularity to it. It is anger mixed with grief and love. It is rage made of a betrayal of trust to protect what is most loved and valued.

The film itself rages against grasps for power through violence including the battering and rape of women, police brutality against black bodies, ugly narratives of white supremacy, and the insufficiency of justice in the face of these compounded traumas that fillet our vulnerabilities wide open. Mildred鈥檚 billboards symbolize the voice that names trauma and keeps the community鈥檚 attention on the visible and invisible marks of violence. As theologian Shelly Rambo argues in her book , 鈥淭rauma is what does not go away. It persists in symptoms that live on in the body, in the intrusive fragments of memories that return. It persists in symptoms that live on in communities, in the layers of past violence that constitute present ways of relating.鈥� Mildred wields her testament to the way trauma does not simply go away and constitutes present ways of relating.

Perhaps the thesis question of the film is uttered by Mildred in a moment of reflection, 鈥淪o is that it? There is no God, the world is empty, and it doesn鈥檛 matter what we do to one another?鈥� Director Martin McDonaugh鈥檚 film leaves us with a subsequent answer. Having waded through gestures of the polarities of humanization and brutal dehumanization, it does indeed matter what we do to one another. It matters for the humanity of the other. It matters for the humanity of ourselves.

鈥�It does indeed matter what we do to one another.鈥�

Three Billboards displays a cast of characters that are riddled with sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and ignorance. But rather than create a simple trope of good vs. evil, the director transforms these figures into something more complex: human beings. Each character displays capacity for both unspeakable violence and gestures of goodness. Perhaps what is most disconcerting is how quickly the director disrupts our feelings toward a character and the dynamics between characters in a fraction of a second. People we are ready to hate elude our certainty. People we are ready to love disappoint and confuse us.

For example, during a heated interrogation, the police chief Willoughby, who is dying of cancer, accidentally spits blood in Mildred鈥檚 face. His expression contains that mixture of fear and embarrassment as he fumbles an apology assuring her that he didn鈥檛 mean to do it. She interrupts and meets him with a mother鈥檚 words, 鈥淚 know baby. I know you didn鈥檛 mean to. I鈥檓 going to go get help.鈥� The entrance of vulnerability and suffering turns the characters from combatant in custody to mother, from interrogator to son.

In another example, the director highlights this same radical subversion of hatred when the deplorable officer Dixon is hospitalized for saving Mildred鈥檚 daughter鈥檚 case file from a fire. Dixon finds himself sharing a hospital room with Red Welby, whom he put in the hospital by throwing him out of a second story window. Even after Red discovers the identity of his roommate, he still brings Dixon a cup of orange juice and faces the straw toward him in an act of compassion. Though he is shaking with fear and anger, Red subverts the dynamic and follows through with his small humanizing gesture disrupting the cycle of violence. 聽

Earlier in the film, when we meet Red for the first time, he is reading Flannery O鈥機onnor鈥檚 A Good Man is Hard to Find. O鈥機onnor鈥檚 short story holds a similar eerie tone and mingles much of the same gestures of humanization in the midst of grotesque and murderous violence that we find in Three Billboards. It may serve as a sypher for this complex and fierce film. Both the director and O鈥機onnor seem to be asking, if we are capable of such startling gestures of goodness and humanity, why does it take so much to get us there? Why are these moments so brief? Why are our transformations of change not concomitant with gained knowledge? Why do we not do better when we know better? Throughout the film the tiny gestures that display a capacity for goodness are meant to haunt us. In O鈥機onnor鈥檚 short story, there is no such thing as a good person. There is no such thing as an evil person. There is only a capacity for goodness and evil mixed together in all of us. The moral scaffolding that defines someone as 鈥済ood鈥� is brought down in shambles by a traumatic event. In the final cryptic moment of her story, O鈥機onnor鈥檚 figure of goodness claims the 鈥渆vil鈥� person as a son, one of her own rather than erecting a barrier of moral difference.

Perhaps herein lies the challenge of watching Three Billboards and reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find. How do we hold the tension between wielding a prophetic and holy 鈥淣o!鈥� against violence without dehumanizing the other and ourselves in the process? How do we refuse to condone the actions of evil while claiming the people who perpetuate evil are still people, with capacities for goodness and evil not unlike our own? The director seems to depict the idea that what we do with our traumas impacts how we will be in the world both individually and communally. What we do to one another matters abundantly.

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There are only three stages to this work: to be a beginner,
to be more of a beginner, and to be only a beginner.
– Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert

Beginner鈥檚 Intention
We begin a new year and the question arises, how shall we begin? The turning of time puts us in conversation with our intentions. To return to the start is to be asked: What is it that you desire? Is it close or far away? Is it large enough work to risk your heart? Our desire to set goals and resolutions is expressive of the idea that George Eliot so beautifully articulated, 鈥淚t is never too late to be what we might have been.鈥� In January we decide we want to read more, be better to our bodies, call our loved ones often, seek community, finally make that change that has eluded us. While I have never engaged in this particular cultural practice of making New Year鈥檚 resolutions, there is something vital about creating ontological liturgies that attune us to our actions and desires and ask us to reflect on who it is we are becoming in the midst of all our choosing. This is surely the work of pilgrims and artists, scholars and aesthetes. However, these figures remind us of a great secret. We do not begin again at the turn of the year, but in every moment we are awake enough to take the possibilities offered to us, and make new ones where none are offered. To be a beginner is not to locate ourselves at a particular point in a process. Rather, to be a beginner is a way of perpetually living in relationship to time and our intentions within it. Indeed, to be human is to perpetually begin again.

Beginner鈥檚 Mentality
The art of beginning is of course sustained by a beginner鈥檚 mentality. It is the mindset that enters the unknown with a modicum of naivete, humility, and curiosity. Without preconceived expectations of how something should work, the beginner is open to new possibilities and free to invent by way of improvisation. Jonah Lehrer in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works praises the qualities of the beginner and the outsider whose lack of insider knowledge and parameters makes her less likely to be bound by conventional answers and solutions. It is in fact those who find new connections at the intersections of disciplines that are often the most creative and innovative. The key elements of a beginner serve us well in our pursuit of our intentions.

A good beginner鈥檚 mentality:

• fosters a willingness to play the fool, understanding failure is a crucial part of the process
• asks good questions and puts them in conversation with others鈥� questions and expertise
• is never so dependent on what has always been to stop working for what could be
• has a healthy working relationship with ambiguity and mystery
• listens well
• takes stock of their epistemology, acknowledging their blind spots with humility
• holds a deep memory of the journey thus far
• keeps an active practice of playfulness and disrupts boundaries
• has a capacity for metaphorical and symbolic rather than strictly literal or linear thinking
• acknowledges there is always more to know
• isn鈥檛 so attached to their own expertise that they鈥檙e afraid to ask for help
• continually fuels the fires of curiosity and refreshes their pleasure in the work

鈥淚t is those who find new connections at the intersections of disciplines that are often the most creative and innovative.鈥�

Beginner鈥檚 Summons to Simplify
In his book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, the poet David Whyte argues, 鈥淏eginning well involves a clearing away of the crass, the irrelevant and the complicated to find the beautiful, often hidden lineaments of the essential and the necessary.鈥� His art of beginning includes this summons to simplification. As I read Whyte, I come to understand that the call of the new, be it the new year, or a new intention, is a gesture of taking away, rather than taking on more. The question of the beginner on the journey is, what鈥檚 essential and how do I keep in constant contact with it? I can鈥檛 help but imagine the pack of a hiker who questions each item in her pack. Is it necessary to sustain me in body, mind, spirit?

The simplification extends beyond what we bring to the very steps we take in our journey of becoming. Whyte continues:

It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.

Whyte鈥檚 concept of a beginner cuts through the mental tactics we so often use to obfuscate our desires and elude even ourselves. At times it can be more frightening to actually get what we want than to pine after something in the safety of never achieving it. The simplest definition of a beginner is one who actually begins, who takes that first step which is simpler and closer than we let ourselves even imagine.

As you begin the new year, I invite you to process three questions. Perhaps you could take them for a walk, grab a favorite notebook to write, or an open canvas to paint a call and response: 聽

• INTENTION: What is your next close radical step of courage?
• MENTALITY: What is an element of your mindset that will support your intention?
• SIMPLIFICATION: What is most essential and what needs to be cleared away?

Editor’s Note:聽For more from David Whyte, whom Brittany cites above, join us for the Alumni Lecture Series on March 3. David will be here at 天美视频 for an afternoon workshop,聽鈥�The Practice and Poetry of Listening in Place,鈥� as well as an evening lecture,聽鈥�The Pilgrim Way: Taking the Path of Risk and Revelation.鈥�

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When we think of the tools of an artist, we may visualize tangible elements of the worktable: brushes, typewriters, endless spools of thread and paper and canvas. However, the intangible means nearly every artist, theologian, and thinker employs is something we both crave and fear: solitude.

Many great voices have commented on solitude adding their warnings and summons. Picasso suggested that, 鈥淲ithout great solitude, no serious work is possible.鈥� Nietzsche argued that, 鈥淚t is what one takes into solitude that grows there, the beast within included鈥� (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). D. W. Winnicott contended that the capacity to be alone is in fact a, 鈥渟ign of maturity in emotional development.鈥� Of all those who have weighed in on solitude, I turn to two poets who have most definitively shaped my own concept of both the tension and beauty held in this deliciously fraught practice: Jane Hirshfield and Rainer Maria Rilke.

In her book Come, Thief, two lines from a poem of Hirshfield鈥檚 prompted this blog post and the search for many more words on solitude. She writes, 鈥淲rong solitude vinegars the soul,/ right solitude oils it.鈥� In that simple phrasing she captures the troublesome phenomena: there are better and worse ways to go about being alone. With the same tool we can nourish ourselves, expand our capacities, and keep ourselves malleable and imaginative. By the same token, we can pickle ourselves bitter with loneliness.

As a contemporary culture, we wrestle between the polarities of infinite possibilities for connection and systemic loneliness. In this context, is it any wonder that solitude has perhaps lost its luster and value? When I think of our reticence to enter solitude, four primary questions come to mind:

• Are we more afraid of being alone, or of the chorus of voices that will meet us in the silence?
• Are we more afraid of the absence of people, or of being in our own presence?
• Are we more afraid of the quiet, or of the questions that arise there?
• Are we more afraid of stepping away from social obligation, or of hearing the call of our deep work?

Though we may seek solace, solitude can take us into places where we are both alone and not alone, quiet and cacophonous. In thinking about Hirshfield鈥檚 categories of right and wrong solitude, sketching out the characteristics of each is important for facing our fears and shaping a positive relationship to the invaluable resource.

Qualities of Right Solitude

• Right solitude isn鈥檛 free from pain or fear, but it is generative. No one can know your inner world better than you. Solitude is an important place where we are called to attend to that inner world. Our presence and attention to our private thoughts, feelings, and narratives can be life giving, even as it is harrowing. It is often the artists among us that know how to linger and dwell in difficult and hidden places with an ear pressed to meaning and a voice to give it form.
• While it may seem counterintuitive, right solitude is often a dialogical space where ideas can intersect and integrate. The root of the imagination is that place of convergence and combinatory play. It is in our solitude that we have a chance to listen to the thirdness of things; what happens in-between disciplines and ideas.
• Right solitude is seasonally contextualized, meaning it can have a variety of roles and expressions at different times in our life. Our solitude may help us to lie fallow and learn to rest. At other times it may drive us to fertile production of our best work. In the world of artists and writers, there are distinct cycles of inspiration, gestation, and production. However, nothing substitutes doing the work, and the work gets done in solitude.

Qualities of Wrong Solitude

Unhealthy patterns of behavior and relating can get expressed in our solitude as well as our relationships. When I think of 鈥渨rong solitude,鈥� four phenomena come to mind that can undermine the richness of time alone:

• When we perpetually move toward the safety of isolation rather than risk relationship.
• When we are disempowered by old narratives that keep us from our wisdom and work.
• When the season we鈥檙e in calls for engagement with others rather than retreat.
• When we disengage and spend no time with our inner life even when no one is around.

Keen awareness of what is influencing the quality of our solitude is the first step in beginning to reclaim it and shape it for our benefit.

Protecting Solitude as an Act of Love

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that rhythms of solitude are formed and protected by our relationships. Being alone is in fact not the antithesis of relationship, but rather the foundation of our togetherness. Rilke argues that solitude is at the heart of love, love of course being difficult. He argues, 鈥渓ove consists of two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other鈥� (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Rome May 14, 1904). I take him to mean that a key component of our own identity formation is our capacity to enter and honor our inner world with intentionality and curiosity. It is by differentiating from others that we are able to share ourselves in communion with the glory of our particularity. The work of loving another well includes honoring and protecting their solitude. It is the tacit threads of belonging that allow us to be on our own with secure reassurance that we can take time to disconnect without leaving the connection of community.

In the process of becoming, our flourishing and personing is supported by good rhythms of both solitude and fellowship. As Dr. Pat Loughery might put it, we flourish in the ebb and flow of engagement and retreat. There is no question in my mind that we are communal creatures who are formed by and for relationship. I also believe that rhythms of right solitude, fundamentally nourish our togetherness, our creative work, and our becoming.

References for Further Reading

• Jane Hirshfield, 鈥淰inegar and Oil鈥� in Come, Thief, 2011.
• Rainer Maria Rilke, A Year With Rilke, Translated by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows, 2009.
• Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translated by M. D. Herter Norton, 2004.
• Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 2012.
• D. W. Winnicott, (1958) The Capacity to be Alone. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:416-420.

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The Double Capacity

When I teach week-long writing workshops, I often end class exploring the genre of blessing, pulling from the Celtic tradition among others. Writing and giving blessings is an important way that we send one another into our everyday rhythms and honor what has happened in our time together. While O鈥橠onohue鈥檚 exquisite blessings get most of the attention, I like to give the class his short essay tucked into the back of the book called, 鈥淭o Retrieve the Lost Art of Blessing.鈥� Through his insights, I鈥檝e come to understand that the form of blessing relies on a double capacity. Its task is to simultaneously look outward and honor the reality of what is happening, while looking inward to name the inner experience and resources within.

Writing the genre of blessing participates in the tradition of all art making and language itself: to make visible the invisible world. In fact, O鈥橠onohue suggests that 鈥渢he imagination is the faculty that bridges, co-presents, and co-articulates the visible and the invisible鈥� (Anam Cara, 51). Perhaps one of the reasons we are drawn to particular poets, musicians, writers, and painters is that we feel known by their representations of the world. They hold together both matter and psyche, the visible and in the invisible worlds. Great artists articulate something true that mirrors something true we have already held in our own bodies.

One of the profound things that O鈥橠onohue鈥檚 work suggests is that blessing doesn鈥檛 erase difficulty, but rather reaches deeper. In his essay he argues:

It [blessing] is not the invention of what is not there, nor the glazed-eyed belief that the innocent energy of goodwill can alter what is destructive. Blessing is a more robust and grounded presence; it issues from the confident depth of the hidden self, and its vision and force can transform what is deadlocked, numbed, and inevitable. When you bless someone, you literally call the force of their infinite self into action (207).

The hope of a robust blessing is that we reach for language that is large enough to hold and welcome the full range of human experience. An example of a weak blessing is something like, 鈥淢ay you never know hardship.鈥� Quite frankly, that is just outside of the range of possibility. My understanding of what it means to be human is that our hardships are an inevitable part of the story. Our difficult experiences are our teachers that mark us and make us. A stronger example of a blessing goes something like, 鈥淲hen hardships come, may you not be alone. May you draw on the stories of those who have come before you. May you remain yourself as you respond.鈥�

Blessing and Resilience

Blessings carry with them the particular intimacy and care of direct address. While they are crafted out of the universality of human love, longing, and loss, they use the second-person 鈥測ou.鈥� When I read an O鈥橠onohue blessing, the fact that every 鈥測ou鈥� is addressed to every reader doesn鈥檛 diminish the fact that it feels addressed to me in a particular moment in my life. As the title of the book suggests, a blessing occurs between people and is predicated on connection. Like the book itself, our blessings are meant to bear the marks of our hands as we pass them to one another. They are meant to do much more than wish us well. They are meant to relationally contextualize us. They are meant to thread us into an intricate fabric of meaning and belonging.

One of the laments in O鈥橠onohue鈥檚 essay is that for a culture so steeped in progress and technological communication, we are haunted by disconnection and loneliness. He suggests that not only have we lost the art of blessing, but 鈥渨e have unlearned the grace of presence and belonging鈥� (To Bless the Space Between Us, 194). Research suggests that an important indicator of a person鈥檚 resilience is their connection to a community of support. Our well-being is nourished by people who grieve over what grieves us and delight over what delights us. Our isolation from our own lives and the lives of others weakens our capacity to weather the tempests and thresholds of our lives. The good news is that the inverse is true as well. When we are woven into the fabric of community, we are less likely to unravel. The genre of blessing reminds us that the words that pass between us have potential invite and to invoke. Our words can clear a path for the depth of another soul to emerge. Our words can weave us into one another鈥檚 stories such that we are not alone. The central gesture of a blessing is presence calling to presence.

As we move into a season of gratitude, I am reminded of the words of yet another poet. W. B. Yeats wrote in his poem Vacillation, 鈥淚t seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless.鈥� There is something beautiful about the cyclical nature of that line. It reminds me that blessing is gratitude made manifest in the world. Having known love, we seek to love others well. Having been witnessed, we bear witness to others. Having known suffering, we listen to the suffering of others. Having been accompanied through thresholds, we are moved to accompany others. Having been blessed, we become those who further beget blessing. May it be so with you.

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The woman who anoints Jesus鈥� feet is a familiar story that appears in each of the four gospels. However, as I read it this year, in the midst of deep political and social unrest, it occupied my imagination in a new way and left me curious about the psychological and theological implications of a universal human emotion: disgust. Do we really see one another?

To summarize the scene, a woman enters the home of a Pharisee where Jesus is a guest and she anoints Jesus鈥� feet with her tears and expensive ointment and dries them with her hair. The Pharisee is critical of the gesture and Jesus鈥� response. Matthew, Mark, and John鈥檚 gospels depict the offense as waste of a resource that could have benefited the poor. Luke鈥檚 gospel does something different with the story and places the offense around the label of 鈥渟inner.鈥� In both cases what gets provoked in the Pharisee is the response of disgust.

Disgust Psychology

To explore the emotion further, I turned to Richard Beck鈥檚 book, , where he delves into the psychology of disgust and its impact on our morality and hospitality. Beck reminds us that while we come into the world prepared for the universal human emotion, much like language, disgust is socially and culturally shaped. The plasticity of our disgust response prepares us to fit into our cultural and environmental ecosystems. In other words, while all cultures exhibit disgust, different cultures have different stimuli/response pairings.

From a biological perspective, disgust is incredibly useful to keep us from ingesting something toxic. At its core, disgust is a response that deals with boundaries and governs the categories of 鈥渋nside鈥� and 鈥渙utside.鈥� Our response triggers a reflex when things should be avoided or forcefully expelled from our bodies. In Beck鈥檚 words, disgust can be quite 鈥減romiscuous,鈥� attaching to any number of things beyond food. Where this becomes violently dangerous is when 鈥�people take the place of objects of expulsion鈥� and we divide one another into 鈥渋ngroups鈥� and 鈥渙utgroups.鈥�

Boundaries & Your Brain

This made me wonder, what is going on in our brains as we react to people who have been placed in an 鈥渙utgroup?鈥� It turns out neuroscientist, David Eagleman asked this exact question. In his fascinating miniseries for PBS called , he highlights that we are social creatures and quite literally need one another to survive. Our brains aren鈥檛 just an interconnected network of neurons on their own, but are embedded in a network of other people鈥檚 brains. A huge amount of all that neural circuitry is dedicated to reading one another.

Our capacity to determine the internal state of another human being is facilitated by our mirror neurons. When we go to our favorite independent movie theatre, for example, our empathic response fires when we see someone fall in love or scream in pain. In fact, Eagleman suggests the same matrix of pain that tells us when we are hurting is used to tell us when someone else is hurting. This social feature of reading one another has allowed human beings to group together for survival, growth, and well-being. However, something can interrupt our neural response.

Eagleman devised an experiment to engage this question of how empathy is impacted by 鈥渋ngroups鈥� and 鈥渙utgroups.鈥�150 participants were shown images of 6 hands being injected with a needle. He then added a single word identifier to label each hand, in this case the religion of the person, and measured the neural response of the participants again. Eagleman found a trend that the pain matrix in the brain wasn鈥檛 responsive to the 鈥渙utgroup,鈥� but remained highly responsive to hands perceived as belonging to their 鈥渋ngroup.鈥� Even as little as that single word identifier was enough to elicit the discrepancy in response. The takeaway is simply the more 鈥渙ther鈥� and 鈥渙utside鈥� a person is perceived to be, the less engaged our empathic response, and the easier it is to dehumanize them.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum affirms that our disgust mechanisms can create highly problematic social realities. Just as we might expel an object from the body, certain people or groups can be excluded and expelled from the community. She argues that often, 鈥淲e need a group of humans to bound ourselves against who will come to exemplify the boundary between the truly human and the basely animal鈥� (Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 107). In other words, when disgust transfers to people, we run into trouble with our making and maintaining of boundaries. The 鈥渙ther鈥� can become less than human in our eyes.

Do You See This Woman?

If we run Luke鈥檚 account through this lens of disgust, the Pharisee is concerned less with the human being in front of him and more with a complex web of boundaries that encompassed food, gender, body, social status, sin, and religious purity. Jesus鈥� response provided an alternative model of intimacy that flew in the face of all that sociomoral disgust. Instead of chewing out the Pharisee, Jesus does that great rabbi thing. He asks a question and then tells a parable. He first turns to the Pharisee and asks, 鈥淒o you see this woman?鈥�

It鈥檚 an odd question given that the focal point of the room has shifted to this unfolding drama. Of course he sees her; everyone can鈥檛 not see her. However, the presence of sociomoral disgust has changed his vision and connection to this human being who is an 鈥渙ther鈥� to him in the categories his cultural context has shaped for him. He sees not her, but the representation of boundaries crossed. In the midst of his expulsion reflex to maintain purity, Jesus asks the Pharisee to please look again. His simple question provokes the idea that until we can see one another, we鈥檙e not going to understand the open table fellowship that Christ continually invites us into. Jesus鈥� question reverberates: 鈥淒o you see this person?鈥�

What we do with disgust shapes what we do with our neighbors.

Becoming attentive to how our disgust is continually shaped by our sociocultural locations may be an important element of how we navigate the day, read the news, engage on social media, and talk to one another over coffee. We may all have different groups of people in mind that are triggering our disgust and our desire to differentiate, put up boundaries, and expel the 鈥渙ther.鈥� Even still, what has been true for centuries remains true. Our survival still depends on seeing one another well, and making sure that people remain subjects in the unfolding story and not objects of disgust. Beck argues that the Eucharist itself engages the many categories of our disgust: food, hospitality, salvation, and the physical body. At the Eucharist table, we trade the model of expelling the other for a model of welcome. It is here that we exchange the words 鈥済et out鈥� for the invitation of 鈥渃ome to the table.鈥�

Explore our Master of Arts in Theology & Culture graduate degree program.

Resources for Further Engagement

Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011).

The Brain with David Eagleman, PBS Series, 2015. (See particularly Episode 5, 鈥淲hy do I Need You?鈥�)

Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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Ambiguous Loss

Boss argues, 鈥淎bsence and presence are not absolutes.鈥� In other words, human relationships are complex in the way family members can be both there and not there. The people that we love can go missing physically in dramatic ways such as in natural disasters and wars, but they can also go missing psychologically in incremental and various ways. Boss argues that ambiguous loss, while a new terminology, is far from a new phenomenon and nearly ubiquitous in human experience. She explains two distinct ways that ambiguous loss shows up in our relationships.

The first type of ambiguous loss occurs when a loved one is absent physically, but psychologically and emotionally present to the family. Examples of this include situations such as: 聽

• Immigration 聽
• Incarceration
• Missing persons in war, natural disasters, or accidents 聽
• Military deployment
• Elderly mate moving to a nursing home
• Adoption
• Divorce

The second type of ambiguous loss describes the inverse, where a loved one is physically present, but psychologically and emotionally absent to the family. Examples of this include situations such as:

• Alzheimer鈥檚 and other dementias
• Depression
• Traumatic brain injury
• Chronic mental illness
• Divorce 聽
• Addictions
• Homesickness (immigration/ refugees)
• Preoccupation with work/ workaholism
• Obsession with TV, internet, games, etc.

If we listen to the latent questions that come with these examples we might hear: What happened to this person? Will the person return? If so, will they disappear again? Who will this person be from day to day? Because of the unanswerable questions, ambiguous loss can freeze or complicate our grief. What鈥檚 important to note is that the complexity of the situations themselves make for a complexity in the way we grieve. Boss emphasizes that both types of ambiguous loss come from a circumstance outside of the person and not from individual pathology. 聽

Resilience & Ritual

Ambiguous loss defies and thwarts any instincts to resolve, fix, or cure. This can be especially difficult in the Western American culture so defined by mastery and solving problems. Instead, our ambiguous loss calls us to resilience and healing in the midst of our suffering. Often, we can wrongly imagine resilience as an invulnerable feat of 鈥渂ouncing back鈥� in a linear fashion. We were hurt, and then we return to the previous state having not been affected. Rather, resilience is an adaptive trait that allows us to integrate our losses and learn to live well with them in the ongoing cycles of non-linear grief. What Boss understands is that our ability to live with ambiguity is a formative element of our resilience.

In the case of a literal death, the finitude cues social, cultural, and religious rituals. Food, clothing, communal gatherings, singing and story, etc. are instruments that help us recognize and honor the loss of a life. A literal death may also contextualize us in our communal relationships, possibly prompting support and recognition of the loss. By contrast, ambiguous loss is accompanied by an ambiguity around if and how to acknowledge and grieve the losses. Acting as though the person is totally gone, or acting as though nothing has changed are both deeply unsatisfying. The truth of the situation lies in the non-binary middle space between absence and presence. It is often in the midst of this middle space that we both crave and lack rituals and liturgies to lament well and find meaning. 听听听

To grieve is to participate in our own healing. In fact, many theological and social thinkers such as Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Soong-Chan Rah* hinge hope and healing to our capacity to lament. They understand that lament allows suffering to speak rather than explaining it away. In the case of ambiguous loss, Boss reminds us that it often takes leaders and healers to offer an invitation to creative rituals, symbols, and expressions that help people grieve the accumulation of ambiguous losses along the way.

天美视频 trains us to inhabit pastoral, therapeutic and culture-shaping roles. So, my questions for us are these:

• How are we inviting people to tell the truth about where it hurts without moving too quickly to falsely resolving the ambiguous and unresolvable?
• How might we expand our cultural vocabulary around grief and what is worthy of lament in our stories?
• How might we create private, communal, and civic rituals made of gesture, word, activity, and place to accompany us as we learn to live well in the tension? 聽聽

Resources for Further Reading:

• Dr. Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief

• Boss, Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss

• Boss, Loving Someone Who Has Dementia

• On Being. Podcast with Dr. Pauline Boss and Krista Tippett 聽

*We are pleased to welcome Reverend Dr. Soong-Chan Rah as this year鈥檚 Stanley Grenz Lecture Series keynote speaker. Dr. Rah will open the series on Tuesday morning, November 6 with a lecture entitled 鈥淭he Necessity of Lament in a Broken World鈥� and close in the evening with a dialogue engaging 鈥淲hite Supremacy, Racialized Trauma, and the Need for a Redemptive Mediating Narrative.鈥� We invite you to join us for this annual, free event honoring the legacy of Dr. Stanley Grenz and our ongoing commitment to the intersection of theology and culture.

to learn more and RSVP.

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