The Promised Land / War

Maybe it was last year. I was in the middle of a class discussion about—well, I forget exactly what, maybe it was Ivan Illich, maybe it was Václav Havel—and the conversation turned to the topic of war. Most college students, in my recent experience, don’t think much about war—or about current events to be honest—but I have been reminding them for over twenty years that the horrors of the past, of genocide, the Holocaust, chemical and biological warfare, could happen at anytime. If Germany, home of the most sophisticated and educated European culture of the early twentieth century could cave to something like Nazism, it could happen to anybody. Seeing recent disconcerting events unfolding over the Western Democracies™, I guess I was right.

I have thought long and hard about the problem of war, though I have never served in the military. Perhaps this stems from my earliest memories of waiting for cartoons to start on television in the morning and having to wait through the news reports of the dead and missing in Vietnam. I’m sure those experiences, administered in homeopathic doses over the course of my early childhood, served as something of an anti-war vaccine.

The thing is, as I was discussing with my students, I can’t believe war is still a thing. You’d think the human race would have figured this out by now, right? Watching recent geopolitical developments—not only in Ukraine, but also in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, and elsewhere—I find myself somewhat astonished that people go along with this theme and variation on totalitarianism and “soft totalitarianism” (“it’s for your safety”). And I don’t just mean the general populations, but also those enlisted in the military and police forces. Why do the men and women in uniform go along with the ruse? Why do they victimize the proletariat at the command of their masters? And I have also watched—and I’m sure you have, too—as people of relatively comfortable means in a kind of mimesis of the elite classes cheer on the prospect of war—even nuclear war. This is insane.

Over the course of my life struggling to understand the phenomena of war and human cruelty, I have turned to two sources of, if not comfort, then at least of consolation: the Iliad and the writings of my tutelary spirit, Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time.”

The Iliad tells the story of the absurdity of war. The Greeks have been fighting in Troy for a decade—just to get Helen back from Paris and restored to Menelaos. Hardly a prize worth all the lives lost. But this is how the powerful roll. To add irony to the tale, Homer opens The Iliad with Achilles sulking in his tent because Agamemnon took away his war trophy, the slave girl Briseis, for his own. The story’s absurdity is extended further in Achilles’s slaying of Hector, the most noble figure in the epic, and dragging his body behind his chariot in shame for weeks afterward. Integrity doesn’t matter in a world characterized by absurdity. As Weil writes in her essay, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,”

“The wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter—all these elements combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero.” [1]

I think this an apt description of our own moment—and of much of the chatter on social media (from people who will never pick up a weapon) for that matter. Force is the sole hero.

Weil expands on this notion in “Human Personality,” concerning the usually unspoken utterance, “Why am I being hurt?”:

“Those people who inflict the blows which provide this cry are prompted by different motives according to temperament or occasion. There are some people who get a positive pleasure from the cry, and many others simply do not hear it. For it is a silent cry, which sounds only in the silent heart.

“These two states of mind are closer than they appear to be. The second is only a weaker mode of the first; its deafness is complacently cultivated because it is agreeable and it offers a positive satisfaction on its own. There are no other restraints upon our will than material necessity and the existence of other human beings around us. Any imaginary extension of these limits is seductive, so there is a seduction in whatever helps us to forget the reality of the obstacles. That is why upheavals like war and civil war are so intoxicating; they empty human lives of their reality and seem to turn people into puppets. That is also why slavery is so pleasant to the masters.” [2]

The question is: how intoxicated are we at this point?

Weil’s contemporary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin served in World War I and saw the horrors of armed conflict up close. He recalls his state of mind in the face of this in his essay “The Promised Land”:

“—And was peace, then, no more than this?

“—The peace that all through these long years was the brilliant mirage always before our eyes.

“The peace that gave us courage to hold fast and to go into the attack because we thought we were fighting for a new world.

“The peace that we hardly dared to hope might be ours, so lovely it seemed…

“And this is all that peace had in store for us!” [3]

Thus “The War to End All Wars.” Thus geopolitics. Thus “The Great Reset.”

In a kind of scatological free-association, this all reminded me of a song I wrote with my friend Graham when we were in our early twenties. We’d been writing songs together since we were fifteen and we were just getting good at it. We were exploring a variety of genres and styles, incorporating mandolin, harmonica, fiddle and other instruments into our arsenal of available textures. It was really an exciting time. The world opened up. Everything seemed possible.

One Sunday night we were driving around in my jalopy drinking whiskey and Coke (don’t judge me) listening to a documentary or something about Bob Dylan. I remember something about Dylan hitchhiking around Minnesota, something about the Bible, something about trying to find himself as a young man—something Graham and I were doing ourselves.

The next day or so I came up with a very folky and clever chord progression and showed it to Graham. He immediately got to work and the Dylan story transfigured through his imagination. I can’t recall all of the verses, but snatches come back:

Looking out into the blazing sun

With my Bible and my thumb

No inclination as to where we’d go

No inclination at all

But I remember the chorus:

Thanks be to Jesus and to everyone

I thank the Lord I am alive

Thanks be to you, my trusted friend

All together: We’re alive.

Now Graham wasn’t then a religious person, nor is he now that I know (haven’t seen him for a few years). But something beautiful spoke through him then. We called the song “The Promised Land.” What I loved about his lyric was that it didn’t offer any answers. Rather, it rested in the knowledge that the Promised Land is a reality we can enter at any time, that it is always present. Even in times of war.

One of the great anti-war poems.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1. Simone Weil, An Anthology (Grove Press, 1986), 186.

2. Ibid., 52.

3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague (Harper & Row, 1965), 278.

A Spirituality That’s Not a Luxury

Simone Weil

People often ask me what my “spiritual practice” is like. It’s a weird notion, when I think about it. Because I don’t think of it as something on the side, an a la carte indulgence for the leisure class, or for people with more leisure time than I’ve ever had. American Buddhists seem particularly interested in one’s “practice,” and a kind of judgmentalism often accompanies the inquiry. In that way, a “spiritual practice” becomes another idol of middle class consumerism, kind of like flaunting a tan in January by trips to Florida or California or Hawaii was in the seventies and eighties. “Check out my disposable income!”

It’s also the case with those with the leisure to indulge in various forms of “retreat.” Now, I like the idea of a retreat, but, for me anyway, leaving my life to focus on “inner spiritual work” suggests only a kind of selfishness. I would surely feel overwhelming guilt for gifting myself with such spiritual “me time.” All the tasks I would leave to my wife or my children, just so I can, quite literally, retreat.

Don’t get me wrong, prayer and contemplation are central to my life—but only because they are part of my life and not something superadded as a bourgeois indicator of status, if only to myself.

In my twenties, like many people, I tried out various meditative disciplines—a half hour of meditation each morning before heading to work, for example, or following various instructive paths in search of the possession of some kind of spirituality. Before we were married, my wife and I used to visit the church of the now defunct Duns Scotus Friary in Southfield, Michigan to pray the rosary and sit still for a while—it was a beautiful Romanesque building with an incredibly beautiful rose window and an imposing walnut carving of the Virgin standing before it.

But then we had children. Lots of them. And a farm. And animals.

For a while, I used to carry a pocket-sized edition of The Way of the Pilgrim, and I was intrigued by the message of the book, taken from 1 Thessalonians 5, to “pray without ceasing.” I like this idea. I also bought the Philokalia as a way to get into the secret of prayer. I also read Thomas a’ Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Ultimately, they only served to discourage me. Then I realized what the problem was.

The problem wasn’t with me. The problem is that I was turning to men who were neither married nor had children for spiritual advice—rather an affliction in Christianity and to Christians, I think. Their answer was to turn the world into a monastery. What a horrible cultural project. As Vladimir Solovyov—also unmarried and childless—observed, Christ sent the Apostles into the world, not into the desert. I know a lot of people are convinced that monastic principles applied to life in the world, even family life, offer the key to Christian living (Yo, Ephraimites!), but that model also offers the kind of spiritual keeping-up-with-the-Joneses ethos I saw with the Buddhists, the same implied spiritual snobbery, and, even if it didn’t, is unsustainable for a family for very long.

So, in my social context of family and in my varied worklife—the farm, teaching, editing, writing—I try to keep things as simple as possible—and as contemplative as possible. As I’ve written before, the rosary is a kind of anchor in my spiritual life, though praying it is not some regulated, every-day-at-the-same-time deal. Often I pray the rosary in the middle of the night, after our English shepherd Sparrow wakes me up to go outside and I can’t fall right back to sleep. Sometimes I pray it while driving, or in my deer blind in the autumn, or by the beehives in summer.

I wake Professor Martin up every day at 3:00 a.m., which is why I am so tired.

Another useful approach, that I’ve found at least, is that offered by the anonymously written medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing which recommends simplicity as method. In contemplation, the Cloud author recommends, besides the traditional prayers of the Church, to pray without words, or at least with as few as possible:

“And if they be in words, as they be but seldom, then be they but in full few words; ye, and in ever fewer the better. Ye, and if it be but a little word of a syllable, methinks it better than of two and more according to the work of the spirit.” [1]

But perhaps the most helpful guide I have found in leading a prayerful life while still in the world has been one of my patron saints, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil—who also had neither spouse nor children. For Weil, the entire secret to the spiritual life resides in attention. Her prescription is something available to anyone, even schoolchildren, as she writes in the essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”:

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired with we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to prepare it.” [2]

She sees this happen even in the mundane school tasks of working out an algebra problem or translating from Latin or Greek:

“it does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so…. Without our knowing or feeling it, the apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.” [3]

“Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.

“In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.” [4]

And, of course, attention is not only for children, as Weil writes in the essay “Attention and Will”:

“Attention unmixed attention is prayer.

“If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.

“Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.” [5]

And, finally, in “Human Personality,” Weil speaks most directly: “The name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love.” [6]

This is my primary answer to the question “What is your spiritual practice?” I try to pay attention—to my farm, its plants and animals, waters and woods; to what I’m reading, what I’m writing; and to the people in my life. I can’t maintain that level of attention all the time, but it is the still spot to which I always try to return. It may not be very glamorous, but it’s sustainable. And you don’t need to have a “spiritual father” or “spiritual mother” to do it. It is also the essence of Sophiology.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (TEAMS, 1997), 65. I have modernized the spelling.

2. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crauford (Harper, 1951), 62.

3. Ibid., 58.

4. Ibid., 63.

5. The Simone Weil Reader, ed. Siân Miles (Grove Press, 1986), 212.