The Lord's Prayer

I say the Lord’s Prayer over breakfast, as discreetly as I can, so that I will not be one of those who pray standing in the synagogue, or on the street corner (or on the War Department YouTube channel) in order to be seen of men. The wording I use is as in the King James' Matthew, though I say “trespasses” rather than “debts,” as the Catholics do. The power and glory bit at the end, which seems to be a late addition to the scripture, I leave to Hegseth and his ilk: they have their reward.

I always remember Lama Michael’s response to someone asking about celebrating Christian holidays when one is not a Christian: after one of his characteristic, unsettling pauses, he said carefully, “it’s not obvious to me that I am not a Christian.”

In fact, in this twilight of my life, as I give rein to my intuitional mind to play with prayer as it sees fit, it is obvious to me that I am a Christian, in several important senses. There has never been a teaching I responded to more immediately and viscerally than the Sermon on the Mount.

The Dalai Lama once said that you should practice in the religious tradition you grew up in, if you can, which is good sense: it will be adapted to your sensibilities and your culture in ways that no alien tradition will be able to match. I used to mull that over, and conclude that I was someone who grew up in a Christian culture who could not practice in it, because of its insistence on endorsing propositions about God that seem to me to be inescapably self-contradictory, and clearly wrong. But of course I didn’t grow up Christian, or only Christian. I grew up atheist and aggressively, reductively materialist, as well. (My mother was some sort of faint Christian who didn’t choose to challenge my father’s atheism: I often wonder now what her interior religious life was like. I will never know.) My father’s morality is entirely Christian, though, like many atheists, he fondly believes that he thought it all up rationally.

And then Buddhism has been an equally deep influence: if it came later, it was also the context of almost all my structured spiritual practice, and my most influential teachers. I have fallen gradually back into praying, before meditation, with the full Buddhist prayers, together with their references to enlightenment and reincarnation: using my own tailored versions felt increasingly artificial and stupid – like correcting someone’s grammar when they’re making a passionate declaration of love. There are times when being correct is not being right.

So I have either become one of those woolly-headed vague spiritual types that I used to to view with such contempt: or else I’ve simply realized that I come from a thoroughly decayed and fragmented background, that I’m the pup of an old bitch gone in the teeth, and there’s nothing to be gained by pretending I’m anything else. I’m not going to obtain authenticity by picking some old tradition and pretending I don’t know anything about any other. There is no way to back up, and anyway I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go on.

Putting Off Taking a Shower

I like taking showers. Sometimes very hot showers. Sometimes cold showers, that make me gasp and blow and remind me forcibly that I am alive. Sometimes showers are luxurious and sometimes they're brisk; sometimes I sing and other times I laugh at my own terribly clever jokes; at dire times of my life, the privacy afforded by streaming water was the only privacy I had, and I've been grateful to it ever since.

So it is particularly ludicrous that one of the things I have to force myself to do is -- take a shower. It's an expenditure of oomph, and oomph is a commodity I've always been a little short on. But I will put off taking a shower for hours, or even days, as if I dreaded them.

What is that thing? That resistance? In Iain McGilchrist's terms -- which are the most meaningful I've encountered for understanding this sort of thing -- it's the usurpation of the left brain. I'm engaged in something the left brain has control of: scrolling in Facebook, or solving a Rubik's cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the left brain is stubbornly clinging to power, like an elderly blowhard senator, well into his dotage, who absolutely will not yield the floor. Embarrassing for all concerned, and no good to man or beast, but by God it's got motor control and it intends to keep it.

And that affliction, of the left brain refusing to yield, is what mindfulness meditation addresses, and which for me very little else ever does. Sitting shamatha is -- especially in the early phases of a sit, when meditation is, as a newbie would view it, "not working" -- a hissing and spitting cat fight. The left brain makes bid after bid at seizing motor control, and the right brain does nothing more complicated than saying "No. You have to wait." Tantrum after tantrum, wheedle after wheedle, ingenious excuse after ingenious excuse. You just practice saying, "No, You have to wait."

The right brain is, actually, and properly, the master. It is in every sense prior. But we are in a culture that has forgotten that: which cultivates, pampers, and indulges the left brain no matter what it's set its heart on. We've forgotten that solving problems is useless -- far worse than useless, positively ruinous -- if the problems are the wrong ones. The one thing the left brain cannot do is step back and say, "is this even the right problem?"

Novels You Ought to Read

A friend was asking what Dickens novels he should read, the other day. I had to think a bit. I listed, I think, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations as the novels "I would not want to die without having read." He seemed a little surprised by that way of putting it.

I happily read any Dickens novel, but that's quite different from my sense of their importance. I don't feel that people who aspire to a literary education should read The Old Curiosity Shop or A Tale of Two Cities. But they really should read Great Expectations.

I realize this is a very old-fashioned point of view, and one that is shared by some extremely unpleasant people in the current ideological moment. To be clear -- or maybe to be obscure -- I do not hold the value of these novels to be absolute, which I would consider philosophical nonsense. They are not (importantly) things, they are invitations to spiritual dances, and their value depends on where the dancers start from, what they need, and what steps they already know. It will change. Grow up and get over it. That doesn't mean that all novels are of equal value, or that assessing their value is inappropriate. It just means that you are assessing the readers as well as the writers, to the best of your ability. Which is a piece of staggering effrontery, of course, but it's also what every human being owes to their fellow human beings. We're in this together, kids.

I have devoted much of the last ten years to reading Spanish fiction, and while I've read many rewarding novels I've encountered only two novelists I would not want to die without having read: Gabriel García Márquez and Ana María Matute. You should read Cien años de soledad and El otoño del patriarca; you should read Primera Memoria and Olvidado rey Gudu. Three of these exist in excellent English translations: I'm fervently hoping that Laura Lonsdale will come through with an English Gudu sometime, but she's a busy woman and it's a large project.