Category Archives: Faith and Culture

Faith, Love, Acceptance: All Summed Up in a Yogurt Shop

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Travis Griffith

Travis Griffith shares a brief moment in time that, in his opinion, sums up all that is right with humanity. Does it? We’d love to hear your stories too!

Sometimes conversations about faith get so bogged down in philosophy that we forget to look at the human aspect.

We can discuss the relativity of truth and whether or not Jesus is a triune God until we throw up, then wonder if we even got anywhere.

Religious commentary and mock speeches for the pope are interesting and worthy of conversation, but what about the little moments that happen in everyday life that so often go overlooked? Sometimes that’s where the answers, or at least the most valuable lessons, lie.

One of those moments happened last Tuesday when I was at a small, locally-owned frozen yogurt shop with my wife, sister-in-law and two kids. The shop is in a university district and frequented by college kids (especially on Tuesday nights… $1.69 mediums!).

On this night, among the throngs of nubile college co-eds, two of the oldest people I’d ever seen were there; sitting a few tables away from us. This couple had to be close to celebrating their hundredth wedding anniversary. The man, wearing a matching tweed hat and jacket, was hunched over and moving slowly. The woman was seemingly frozen in mid-bite. A folded up walker rested against the man’s chair. The couple didn’t say a word to each other and seemed oblivious to the incredibly diverse, laughing, chatty, text-messaging crowd that surrounded their table.

I was just amazed that the kids had enough respect to keep their distance and allow the couple to enjoy some peace. But then the frail lovers of frozen yogurt began the arduous process of getting up from the table and exiting the building. It was then that a complex choreography of absolute human beauty unfolded.

First, one of the college girls at a table next to ours nudged her friend and uttered a quiet, “Cute…” as the couple stood up. Then a man across from their table fluidly stood up, while talking on a cell phone, and in one motion unfolded the old man’s walker and set it in front of him before gracefully falling back into his seat and not missing a beat in his conversation.

Walker in place, the couple put on their jackets and made their way for the door. Crowds parted to allow them access.  A customer just entering the shop stopped and held the door open for much longer than would have been necessary, allowing the couple to exit without having to lift a finger.

The couple’s Cadillac was parked directly in front of the shop, but the man had to shuffle down the sidewalk until he could step off a lower part of the curb before shuffling his way back up to his car. By the time he got there and started the process of opening the passenger side door, another yogurt customer was passing by and opened it for him. The man gave a small nod before disappearing into the leather-clad abyss of the Caddy’s interior.

The man’s walker was still outside the car though. His wife managed to fold it up, but when she opened the back door to slide the walker in, she lost her grip on the door and it slammed shut. A customer exiting the shop with her daughter noticed, and opened the door again. She even took a moment to slide the walker onto the rear seat. The old lady smiled, held her purse in front of her chest with both hands, said thank you and began to work her way around to the driver’s seat.

As the white reverse lights blinked on, I turned to my wife who had happened to watch the entire chain of events unfold too. We mouthed the word “wow” to each other and went on with our conversation. Everyone else in the shop was either engaged in conversation or had thumbs flying across phone keypads. They were oblivious.

The amazing thing about this? No one who helped the couple seemed to notice the person who helped just prior. This was not inspired kindness, but pure, genuine individual compassion that when viewed from 15 feet away looked like a perfectly timed and choreographed TV commercial for human grace. It was nothing short of heart warming and inspiring.

In that little yogurt shop, and for no more than five minutes, humanity came together as one to help an elderly couple in need of a little love and assistance. Then everything returned to normal. But for that moment it didn’t matter what religion anyone in that shop followed. Prejudices and orientations and races and beliefs were all overshadowed by one commonality between us all:

Pure, unconditional acceptance of humanity.

Ahh… if only the rest of life was so easy.

Have you seen any similar moments of human compassion unfold? Let’s hear your stories!

***

Travis Griffith, who left behind the corporate marketing world, choosing family and writing in lieu of “a comfortable life” financially, is a former atheist trying to define what leading a spiritual life really means. His children’s book, Your Father Forever, published in 2005 by Illumination Arts Publishing Company, Inc. captures only a fraction of his passion for fatherhood.

A Writer Wrestling with Unity

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Brent Robison

Brent Robison joins the blog to discuss his thoughts on finding unity within his writing and spirituality.

I write fiction, but I’m not much into plots, nor pleasing resolutions. I love the capital-Q Questions — the questions without answers. I don’t need answers, but I love learning as much as my sub-genius mind can handle about everything we humans have so far come to know in our dogged pursuit of answers to the unanswerable.

That puts me squarely in the realm of the invisible, where I travel alone. I don’t self-identify as Christian. There is no “ism” I feel attached to. Yet there is a driving force in my heart and mind to explore the territory — call it “spiritual” — that every religion’s fringe-dwellers, the mystics, have resided in for millennia: the philosophical borderlands currently going by the name of Nonduality. In Christianity today, perhaps Bernadette Roberts is its leading investigator, with her contemplative teachings and “No-Self” books. In her experience, the self and God are not separate: “I and my Father are One,” one without even the concept of another.

For me, years of study fueled by parallel passions — science and metaphysics — gradually led me to glimpse a perfect interweaving of current knowledge and ancient wisdom. Quantum physics intertwined with Advaita (Sanskrit for “not two”). Spacetime as a metaphor for Oneness. Superstrings pointing to the Nameless Absolute.

Meanwhile, I played the writing game: workshops, submissions, the occasional publication in a literary journal. But mostly I labored away at writing stories: notes, sketches, little stories, bigger stories. Imaginary characters with lives and hearts and pains all their own kept jumping up and asking to be acknowledged. Inspired by literary realism, postmodern and classic, lush or minimalist, I worked at exploring psycho-spiritual states and getting something both meaningful and beautiful onto the page. Then out of all that jumble rose the challenge that got my blood pumping at a whole new rate….

If everything is One, how is that expressed in story?

Well, it’s been done, with various degrees of success, in many ways:
–exegesis of various cultural mythologies
–allegory or parable with a “moral”
–stories from the lives of famous gurus or holy men
–the conundrums of time travel (see my friend’s book The High Priest of Prickly Bog)
–fanciful alternate realities like those of Italo Calvino
–narrative thought experiments ala Jorge Luis Borges
–straight science fiction: on other planets, things behave differently
–variations on the sword and sorcery genre
–human encounters with angels or extraterrestrials
–magical realism
–etc.

Trouble is, none of these appealed to me. Or rather, they were not what I was doing as a writer. As Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) said, “Everyday life has a huge effect on people.” I wanted to write literary short stories, about us, the common folks. Our ordinary tragedies and existential crises. The mundane epiphanies that move us all incrementally forward. In other words, “real life.”

It was my invented characters themselves who offered me the key. Of their own accord they had began lurking on the edges of each other’s stories. But I wasn’t sure what that meant. Then one day as I surveyed the whole array of stories and fragments, a complex web of faint shimmering lines seemed to materialize before my inner eye. These people, like all of us, were connected by invisible threads, coincidences, ephemeral glancing touches, by which subtle influence was being exerted. Life paths changed in seemingly tiny, but possibly powerful, ways. I saw that we’re like cells in one giant body, all going about our business transporting enzymes from one place to another and effecting change on other cells, but with hardly a glimmer of awareness of our own impact.

To suggest this newfound truth seemed to me the best way I could express Unity. One friend argued, correctly, that interconnection requires separateness, so I was a little off the mark. On the other hand, ultimate oneness is ultimately inexpressible in human language. The best we can offer is suggestion, metaphor, a finger pointing at the moon. And after all, in literary fiction — just as in this thing we call “reality” — the needs, hopes, dreams, heartaches, addictions, and loves of daily life are the foreground. To see the background is another level of perception altogether.

I’m entirely a beginner on the road toward Unitive Consciousness. But that vision of all human beings interconnected by a vast intangible network of influence, invisible energy lines weaving us together, became the engine driving the finishing, assembling, and publishing of a collection of thirteen linked stories called The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. All those bits and pieces of characters’ lives finally came together and made sense, to me. And more important, it set me and my writing on a course for the future, and for that I’m grateful.

***

Brent Robison emigrated west to east and is now rooted in the Catskill Mountains of New York. His fiction has appeared in a dozen literary journals and has won awards from Literal Latté, Chronogram, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. His collection of linked short stories, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, is available wherever books are sold. Between daddy and hubby hours, he blogs at ultimate-indivisibility.com and continues chipping away at two novels-in-progress. He is also the editor and publisher of the Hudson Valley literary annual, Prima Materia. Brent’s short story “Baptism” can be found in Relief Issue 3.2.

The Spectacle and the Spirit (Another blog on Avatar)

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Brad Fruhauff

Brad Fruhauff considers Avatar under the banners of pantheism and the American pastoral.

Okay, so I finally saw Avatar – in “RealD,” no less. There has been no end of press about this film, of course, including some reflections on this site by Travis Griffith (with whose comments I will respectfully disagree, for reasons to be described below), but what got me interested finally was when my students started telling me about reports that, after being immersed in Cameron’s imaginative virtual world, Pandora, a number of people have been feeling depressed and even suicidal .

I was pretty sure this was an overreaction, but I had to see a movie that made people want to kill themselves.

And I was right – these people are overreacting. Pandora is an impressive, fully-realized world full of natural wonders like pretty glowing trees, but it’s still just a fantasy world. In fact, some of the ways it is most realistic also make it less idyllic – take, for instance, the scaly, tendril-waving, giant panther creature or the leathery-winged dinosaur-like ikran, which try to kill you if you try to ride them. This is a world at least as dangerous as it is beautiful. It’s also hostile to humans, who have to wear oxygen masks due to the atmosphere, which is also the premise for developing the biological Na’vi avatars in the first place.

It’s not “just a movie”. . .

But I don’t want to be dismissive of these people who go crazy over something that’s “just” a movie. Granted, it’s not exactly an epidemic or culture-wide phenomenon, but sometimes the “crazy” responses of a minority of people are really a symptom of a wider dysfunction. When a family-systems psychologist, for instance, is brought a child who is “acting out,” she will often have the whole family in to study the nature of the home environment; sometimes the healthy response to a sick family culture is to act “sick.”

So, is getting depressed over Pandora a healthy response to American culture? It’s a response, anyhow, and not an entirely strange one. There is, after all, something in the American psyche that “gets” these kinds of films. David Edelstein is not alone among a multitude of critics who have noted the similarity of Avatar to movies such as Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves. These films seek to redeem both our modern sense of disconnect from nature and the cultural guilt of Euro-Americans toward Native Americans. They achieve this handy double-whammy through romanticized visions of Native American spirituality and/or superficial fantasies of reconciliation and assimilation.

. . . it’s something deep in the American unconscious

Edelstein is also not alone among critics who considered Avatar‘s story “a crock” and yet could not help but speak of it with awe. My wife and I agreed that as long as we weren’t paying too much attention to the plot (or dialogue), the movie was thrilling, spectacular, and entertaining. Let’s face it, there was very little unique about the heroes and villains in this film, and little in the plot that could truly surprise us. Yet how many of us were still spellbound?

How can these reactions be possible alongside the “I’m depressed I don’t live on Pandora” ones?

I’d like to say that some of us are more discerning about the finer points of narration (which were weak) and the craft of film-making (which were pretty strong), but I don’t think any amount of special effects and camera-play could have saved a narrative with absolutely no resonance – and Avatar has resonance.

It goes beyond Dances with Wolves. There’s a similar impulse at work in Longfellow’s famous epic poem of 1855, The Song of Hiawatha, which tries to convince its Euro-American readers that they, too, can have the same mythico-religious relationship to this new land as the “vanishing” Native Americans. As Ross Douthat insightfully describes it for The New York Times, these narratives participate in a decidedly pantheistic impulse that is discernible at the founding of this nation. Our democratic spirit of unity longs to see everything involved in some metaphysical connection, whether in the nature-worship sense or the beacon of history one.

American Pastoral 2.0

This is the American pastoral: a nostalgic myth about being at home in our world and having transcendent experience. The fundamentalist Christian version looks toward some future of American cultural and religious dominance; the pantheistic, “spiritualist” version looks (as Douthat notes) toward an assimilation with the natural world that will also relieve us of our guilt-ridden self-consciousness.

The other side of our expansive democratic spirit is our accumulative consumerism, which is driven by the very technologies that represent our “alienation” from “nature.” The tragedy of the consumer, however, is that he cannot accumulate the whole world, and so the spiritualization of his consumptive desire would be a transcendent union with that world that would obviate his need to consume it.

What Avatar does, then, is update the pastoral myth for a consumer-based, web 2.0 world. I know Cameron wrote his first treatment back in 1995, but he’s clearly adapted it as our technologies changed (and as we got embroiled in Iraq), because Avatar is above all an American-pastoral wish-fulfillment fantasy that all our virtual network connections could become physical and organic.

Think about it: the very title evokes the virtual identities we create or inhabit in our video games. The Na’vi literally have organic USB cables in their heads that can “plug ‘n’ play” into creatures and plants alike, and as Sigourney Weaver’s scientist explains, the planet itself is a living network of roots more complex than the human brain. It’s a compelling vision of life that can satisfy the scientist and the spiritualist at once, and yet it’s packed with all the pathos of the modern American soul, for we have connection only through lifeless plastic devices, and the luminosity of our world consists of the neon artifice of Las Vegas.

So, what am I supposed to think?

My goal is not to pronounce this film good or bad for the Christian viewer. I’m glad I saw it once, in the theater, but I don’t expect my life will be lacking if I never see it again. It’ll probably win all sorts of Oscars, but I expect, like Titanic, we’ll remember it more for it’s budget and earnings than for anything lasting substantive value. We’ll look back years later and say, Avatar was the first to do x, but of course all sorts of movies have surpassed it since then. Or we’ll look back and think of it as a kind of cultural marker, a film that crystallized a moment in our cultural and technological story.

Avatar is certainly a kind of cultural “event,” and, as event, will fade at last like any other thing. As art, it has certainly done something wonderful: given us an experience that casts us back upon the ordinary world with new eyes, if only for a moment.

The Speech that can Save Christianity

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Travis Griffith

Travis Griffith has some advice for Pope Benedict XVI. What do you think of it?

A recent Associated Press news article says Pope Benedict XVI is condemning what he calls a “growing aversion” to the Christian faith.

The article says ‘the pope is urging Christians to invigorate efforts to spread their faith’s message despite what he described as the unfriendly climate to Christianity in parts of the world.’ Benedict is quoted as saying,

In a world marked by religious indifference and even by a growing aversion toward the Christian faith, a new intense activity of evangelization is necessary.

The pontiff went on to say that Christians need to put aside their differences so they can unite their efforts.

Regular readers know by now that I adore the Christian faith and the people who follow it. I believe their religion is the correct one… for them. I also happen to believe that every other religion (or faith or form of spirituality) is equally correct for their respective followers.

I know I’m just a lowly blogger and Benedict is, you know, the pope, but that doesn’t mean I can’t disagree with him. Was he wrong in making the statement he did? Of course not. His truth lies with the Christian faith and he’s just walking his path.

But, it’s not a path I believe is best for the world. I believe intense evangelizing is exactly why there is an aversion to Christianity in the first place. It pisses people off.

With that in mind, instead of saying what he did, I would have liked to see the pope deliver this speech (yeah, now I’m writing speeches for the pope, which is kind of cheesy, but I’d sure have a lot of respect for him if he’d say something like this):

Dear Friends,

It is with great humility that I recognize a growing world trend; a trend that is leading many of the world’s people away from the Christian faith. In fact, I acknowledge that there is even a troubling, and growing, aversion to Christianity.

Our world is marked by religious indifference, and even worse, intolerance. While I, and the followers of Christianity, believe that Christ is the way and the truth, we must also be aware enough to realize not everyone will believe as we do.

In the past I might have called for intense evangelizing to spread the Word and convert non-believers. Today though, I ask of you something even greater. Rather than join the ranks of the intolerant, I ask that we, as Catholics and Christians, evolve to the ranks of acceptance.

How can we preach tolerance without following it? How can we know love if we don’t experience it?

It is simple arrogance to preach that all people of the world should believe as we do. So please, do not evangelize to your Muslim, pagan and atheist neighbors. Love them and accept them for who they are, but remind them the door to Christianity is always open should they choose to walk through it and follow us.

Upon all of you, I invoke the abundant blessings of the Almighty and, in particular, the gift of peace.

Love… to all.

Do you think a speech like this would help reverse the aversion to Christianity? I sure do, but feel free to discuss amongst yourselves, or make fun of me, in the comment section.

***

Travis Griffith, who left behind the corporate marketing world, choosing family and writing in lieu of “a comfortable life” financially, is a former atheist trying to define what leading a spiritual life really means. His children’s book, Your Father Forever, published in 2005 by Illumination Arts Publishing Company, Inc. captures only a fraction of his passion for fatherhood.

***

Editorial Note: The thoughts presented within this blog post are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of the entire Relief staff. Though there may be some differences between the journal’s theology and that of the author, we believe that the questions this author raises about faith and love are important.

Giving It Up

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Amanda C. Bauch

Relief‘s Assistant Editor, Amanda C. Bauch, ruminates on ritual compulsions and Lent.

My fingers were bleeding. Again.

Even as I pause while typing this, my right hand reaches over to the left hand, longing to pluck at a piece of loose skin on my pointer finger. I worried this piece of loose skin on the drive home yesterday, when I was working out, and while I watched the Winter Olympics with my husband.

But it’s not only the fingers. It’s also my legs, my face, my scalp. All subjected to frequent, almost ritualistic, picking. I’ve scratched and dug at my legs so often that they’re bloody and bruised. My face bears scars from years of attempting to rid myself of imperfections, whether real or perceived.

The face digging began when I was in junior high. The finger mangling started in college. The leg scratching and scalp digging are fairly new developments, added to my repertoire over the past year or so.

The escalation of my finger picking during college prompted me to seek counseling. I felt out of control, and I knew the problem wouldn’t go away on its own. All of my fingers wrapped in band-aids, torn and bloody, I cried as I told the doctor that I couldn’t stop and I actually enjoyed hurting myself on some level.

This initial appointment set me on a road I’ve now been on for over a decade, trying to understand why I do what I do.

While I’ve been diagnosed with OCD for some time, I’ve only recently learned about a disorder that goes by many names, but is most frequently referred to as dermatillomania. In layman’s terms, compulsive skin picking.

Viewing a variety of websites and reading testimonies of those who suffer from this ailment, I am amazed to see my story reflecting back at me from my computer monitor. However, one young lady’s comment resonates: “I have not felt worthy.”

Now that we’ve entered the holy season of Lent, I had to decide if I was going to give something up, and if so, what. During Ash Wednesday service, I sat in the pew, praying to God to help me make this decision, all the while picking my cuticles into oblivion. I pulled a particularly tenacious piece of skin I’d been attacking for some time, immediately feeling the tingle and rush of pain derived from tearing off layers of skin.

At that moment, I knew it had to stop, and I felt that God was telling me that it was time.

Granted, this skin picking is a habit I’ve developed over about twenty years of my life, and I know that it’s not going to vaporize overnight. However, I made a commitment to the Lord to try to change. To truly believe that with Him, all things are possible. I am learning to trust Him, trust myself. I’m learning to combat the self-criticism and feelings of unworthiness with His Word: “When I said, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your love, O Lord supported me. When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul” (Ps 94:18-19).

Over these forty days of Lent, I’m giving up my self-criticism. I’m giving up the belief that if I just had enough faith, all of my problems would be resolved. And perhaps most importantly, I’m giving up the belief that I am unworthy.

***

Amanda C. Bauch, is Relief‘s Assistant Editor, a writer, and a teacher. She fled the harsh Upstate New York winters and now resides outside of Jacksonville, Florida.  She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently working on a young adult novel and a memoir.  Her short fiction has appeared in Tattoo Highway, Bent Pin Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, and nonfiction pieces have been published in Writer Advice, Empowerment4Women, as well as two print anthologies, Tainted Mirror and MOTIF: Writing By Ear. She is also a monthly contributor to 30 Points of View, a blog/ezine/something-or-rather ( www.30pov.com).