Thursday, December 24, 2009

Mary and Mrs. Claus

I woke up this morning in the dark, a deep, deepening dark. For a fraction of an instant I wondered. Will this darkness end? Will it ever be light again? Is it true that I (along with the rest of the hemisphere) am poised to swing back on a grand arc of time toward the sun? Or might this darkness engulf me in an eternal night?

The dark is pregnant with possibilities.
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Many tell the Christmas story, and many of those tellings focus on the Christ child. He was conceived. He was carried. He is born. He lives, a divine Presence, with us.

Nevertheless, hidden within all those passive verbal constructions following his name is the one without whom he wouldn’t have happened: Mary.

For me, the Christmas story is about Mary.

Mary conceives. Whether you translate virgin as “young maiden” or “without sex,” the thrust of the story is the same. Young Mary needed no other human person to begin her journey into motherhood. The mother matter was between her and god, a purely personal relationship: god is with her, in her full bodily self, and she opens to say yes. Yes to desire. Yes to her self. My soul doth magnify the lord. Her innermost sensory self is where god will be grown.

Mary carries. In saying yes to her god-self, she says yes to entering the darkness. She is pregnant for the first time. She is not wed. The outcomes are far from clear. Will she live? Will her bodily self know what to do? Will her baby live? Will she be shunned into eternal night? Or embraced by the arms of welcoming kin? How could her sparkling yes not be shrouded with fear, doubt, despair, and loneliness?

Only Joseph is with her as they set out together for Bethlehem, leaving behind hearth and home, riding for miles, for hours, for days, nine months pregnant, on the back of a donkey. What sustains her through the taxing physical, emotional, spiritual ordeal?

Jesus, of course, moves in the darkness too, but his is a warm uterine wrap. He is along for a rhythmic ride, waiting for the waves of her contractions to wash him onto the sands of an air-born world. In her dark night, it is his movement within her that comforts her. He is alive. She can feel it. She has reason to believe.

Mary gives birth. She is waiting in a stable, dark and cold. Joseph is there, but what does he know about birth? What does she know? A sweet smell of coarse hay mixes with animal breath.

There, Mary labors. Wave after wave, she slowly opens to release the life in her. She gives birth to a curled infant, unbelievably small, who, however cry-free he may be, is helpless. He is completely dependent on her. She is the one who holds him, warms him, wipes him, and feeds him rich milk from her body.

He is present with her—and with us—because of what her body knows. She creates patterns of sensing and responding in relation to him that let him live, with her, with us.
*
The birth we celebrate at Christmas is more than a beginning. It is the end of a long journey in which Mary gives birth to herself as a birth-giver. She is the one who opens in the darkness, to the darkness, willing to conceive (of) a light that would not appear for months to come. She is the one who carries it as it quickens, and brings it forth, as a new life beginning. She is the one whose bodily movements enable him to live.

The movements she makes in conceiving, carrying, and birthing make her into someone who can and does participate consciously in the rhythms of her bodily becoming.

He is with us because of what her body knows.
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There are times in all of our lives when darkness threatens to engulf us. Whether it is fear or anxiety, depression or despair, we wonder whether the light will ever return, or whether indeed, we will be dwell forever in eternal night.

It is to such moments that the Christmas story speaks. For we remember Mary. We remember her, in her bodily self, opening to sense and receive the quickening of new life in her.

With Mary, we affirm the creative power of our own bodily selves—a power to open to the movement of the divine in us, that is continuing to create and become, despite the darkness that overwhelms. When we open to this power, we will find the arms that embrace us, the relationships that sustain us, the Presence of light with us.

For our bodily selves were pulled into existence by the rhythm of light and dark, day and night, that enables all things to grow. As long as we breathe and beat and wake, that rhythm is alive in us. We can cultivate a sensory awareness of it, opening to receive the movements that are making us. We so participate in bringing into being a world we love that loves us.

The American dancer, Ruth St. Denis, wrote a poem called “Eternal Mary.” The last stanza is this: “We are all Mary/ Waiting to conceive/ And bear the Christ Child.”

This, for me, is the meaning of Christmas.
*
How did the story of a young woman delivering Presence morph into a tale about an old man delivering presents? It is a topic for another day.

Still, I wonder. Whose sack is it from which he pulls his gifts? Who remembers which child got which gift from year to year? Who gave him directions?

I suspect that if we want the full story, we will have to ask Mrs. Claus.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Selfish vs. Unselfish: Who Wins?

Are humans naturally selfish or altruistic? Have they evolved to value their personal survival above all else? Or to form cooperative social relations with others?

The questions are perennial ones, raised anew by a recently released roster of books. Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists all weigh in, for there is much at stake.

How should we parent, educate, and legislate? What values should we hold, what social norms should we advance, and what means are necessary for helping people adopt them? Must we punish or can we merely entice? What are the resources of nature and the limits of nurture? What can we create ourselves to be?
*
I grew up believing that there is a difference, a big one, between selfish and unselfish. Selfish is doing what you want when you want for yourself, following your desires and pursuing pleasure, often at others’ expense. Unselfish is generous, loving and kind, doing with others in heart and mind. Selfish is bad. Unselfish is good. Period.

I no longer believe it.

Scene 1. A girl attends summer camp with 350 other girls, ages 6 to 17. The camp counselors admonish the girls to value unselfishness, to put others first before themselves, and to compete for the coveted honor of being tapped as a model for all the rest. The campers scramble to be the most unselfish of all, missing the irony.

Wouldn’t the most unselfish act be to act selfishly and so let another girl win?

Scene 2. Leif, my five-month-old son, wants to nurse. Now. Writhing and wailing, he refuses any attempt to divert, distract, or entertain. I stop what I am doing and sit down to give him some milk. Is he being selfish and me not?

If he didn’t ask me for what he needed, he wouldn’t be giving me what I want: I want him to thrive.

Scene 3. A man is in a long-term relationship, afraid to ask his partner for what he needs. He keeps quiet, wanting to preserve the peace, and finds himself less and less able to feel the love for her he knew he once had. For the sake of the relationship, he has silenced his sensory spaces. She feels his distance, and is unhappy.

Before it is too late, he comes to the realization: if he asks for what he needs, he will have more to give. If he asks for what he needs, he will be giving her what she needs to succeed in what she wants to do: love him as he wants to be loved.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give another is the gift of receiving he or she is giving us.

Sometimes our greatest pleasure lies in giving a gift that requires us to exercise an ability in ourselves that we didn’t know we had.

Scene 4. I tell my kids all the time: I am here to help you get what you want. Am I raising spoiled, self-righteous egotists who feel entitled to whatever they desire?

I don’t tell them that I will give them what they want. I tell them that I will help them get what they want. I will help them figure out what they want, and then help them test the idea, research it, plan for it, experiment with it, and try it out over time. For I have no idea what seeds my kids carry; I have no idea what genetic potentials for thinking and feeling and acting that passed dormant through me have been sparked to life by my partner’s chromosomal pairs.

What I do know is that I want whatever seeds are there in them to grow. I want the world to benefit from what they have to give. And I know that such seeds sprout in unprompted desires to spend time learning and creating in one realm or another. These desires can signal the presence of talents and skills, and the reserves of energy, interest, patience, and attention needed to help them develop. Their bodies know.

If I don’t help my kids move towards what they want, they will not learn what it is they have to give.
*
Are humans selfish or unselfish?

It’s the wrong question to ask. There is no such dichotomy. The belief that there is rests on an illusion of ourselves as individual minds-in-bodies that we continue to rehearse as if it were true. It’s not.

Despite what we have learned to believe, and as I have noted before, we are not individuals first. We become humans who are able to think and feel and act as individuals by virtue of the relationships with others who have supported us in becoming who we are.

We are wired from the first inklings of our lives to create relationships with others as the condition for our own maximal health and well being. Who we are is nothing more or less than this impulse to connect with whatever and whomever will enable us to unfold what it is we have to give.

As a result, there is never a moment in which the “self” that acts is only and simply a “self,” and it is impossible to disentangle selfish from un. Every act we make is necessarily both. Our health and well being depends on the balance.

If we only act “for the other” we will soon have nothing to give. It we only act “for ourselves” we will miss out on the pleasure of connecting with those who will support us in our becoming.

The most “selfish” actions we undertake are those that create mutually life-enabling relationships with other persons. The most “unselfish” actions are those that nourish in us in the ability to give whatever it is we have to give.

Fruitful questions to ask, then, are these. What must we do to nourish our ability to keep giving the very best of what we have to give? How do we create mutually life-enabling relationships that will support us in exploring, improving, and becoming who we are?

The we-in-me wants to know.