Xin-Ren

England expects that every man will do his duty.
--Lord Horatio Nelson

We seem to be on a military roll this week, as today marks the 205th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, when Lord Horatio Nelson and the British navy triumphed over the combined might of the French and Spanish, sailing on a ship with the appropriate name of Victory. Lord Nelson died at the end of the battle, but not before emblazoning his name into English history books. Nelson’s legacy includes a legendary leadership ability--so potent, in fact, that he’s leading all of us, today, to the next stop on our journey, for a look at the fascinating Chinese virtue of Xin-Ren (Trust).

But first,  Lord Nelson’s story: Born in 1758 to a family of modest means in Norfolk, Horatio entered the navy on the advice of his uncle and rose through the ranks quickly due to his combined virtues of Valor and Savvy. War injuries rendered him blind in one eye, and during a battle off the Canary Islands in 1797 he took a musketball to his right arm, which a battlefield surgeon soon amputated. Within an hour of losing his arm, Nelson returned to his command. (Wow.) He had some career setbacks due to a reputation for over-zealous pursuit of the enemy and occasionally turning a literal “blind eye” towards orders to retreat.

Nelson’s renown, however, lies in what he referred to as “the Nelson Touch.” Originally this was a moniker for a specific tactic of “divide and conquer” Nelson would use against lines of enemy ships. The tactic relied on Nelson’s unusual level of Trust in his lieutenants, to whom he gave an inordinate degree of Autonomy. A micromanager could never have led such a maneuver. Eventually naval officers began to use the expression “the Nelson Touch” to refer not to the tactic, but to the inspiring leadership Nelson showed among his sailors and petty officers.

And that brings us to Xin-Ren (sometimes written Xing-Ren). Cross cultural scholars have long observed that for the development of the all-important and rather informal Guanxi or “Relationships” that grease the wheels of business in China, Xin-Ren (Trust) gives grease to the grease. Trust has two dimensions: You believe the person you trust has genuine interest in your well-being, and you believe the person has the ability to do what you need him/her to do. Xin-Ren reflects this, as the Chinese word “xin” refers to a person’s Sincerity and concern for the other party, and “ren” refers to Usability, Dependability, or, in business circles, Employability. (Coincidentally, in a few weeks we’ll explore another compound virtue, the Japanese samurai virtue of Chuugi, whose first portion chuu also means “Sincerity.”)

In virtues literature, it can get confusing distinguishing between Trust--your willingness to rely on a person--and Trustworthiness, or the Merit that warrants that Trust. Clearly Trust and Trustworthiness label the same relationship from different directions: When you pass someone a basketball, you show Trust in giving up the ball, and you have that Trust due to the Trustworthiness of the receiver, whose abilities will hopefully yield a slam dunk.

Horatio Nelson’s sailors may have had Trust in him, but what made “the Nelson Touch” legend, and what won his battles, lay in the Trust he showed his officers. The tactic Lord Nelson used required Xin-Ren--the Trust he had that his sailors had both the Ability and the Will to carry out Nelson’s plan.

None of us gets anywhere in life without Trust. We make a leap of Faith every second of the day, from our Trust in the safety of the water we drink and the cars we drive; Trust in our co-workers to support us in our duties; Trust in our personal relationships, where we feel our Vulnerability most tenderly. In passing the ball of Trust or receiving it, how to we communicate our Xin, our Sincerity? How do we convey our Ren, our Reliability? Do we feel those qualities? When your Trust in others fails, does it have more often to do with doubt in others’ Will, or Ability? When we let others down, on which axis do we crump?

Bring to mind Xin-Ren during your reflections today, and recall how its flow between Nelson and his men forged a Power and brought them Victory upon Victory.

May we see the gates of Xin-Ren, and perhaps make a home there.

Disciplina

Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.
--George Washington, Letter of Instructions to the Captains of the Virginia Regiments, July 29, 1759
 
Each year on this day, October 19, the ancient Romans celebrated a festival called the Armilustrium. Soldiers and members of the public paraded about in weapons and armor before cleaning and purifying them for winter storage. The occasion brings to mind the Roman personal virtue of Disciplina, a quality personified as a Goddess and highly celebrated by soldiers.

In Latin the noun Disciplina translates a variety of ways. It can mean education and training; expertise in a specific area of study; self-control and determination; or a well-ordered life. The Goddess Disciplina in turn had three chief virtues to impart to her warriors: Frugalitas (Frugality), Severitas (Sternness), and Fidelis (Faithfulness). Roman soldiers’ Frugality covered not only the careful spending of money, but also conservation of energy and actions--perhaps better captured by the term Efficiency or even Precision. Severitas referred to the soldier’s Focus, Determination, and Decisiveness. Meanwhile, his Devotion to his fellow soldiers and officers as well as the Roman Empire showed the meaning of Fidelis--a virtue still celebrated by the U.S. Marines to this day in their motto Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful).  

Inscriptions in Roman ruins suggest the soliders stationed the furthest away from Rome, such as in North Africa or along the wall of Hadrian in England, had the greatest ardor for Disciplina. Still, the Armilustrium was all about Mars (most of whose rituals occured in--surprise!--the month of March.)  His “leaping priests,” the Salii, danced and did whatever acrobatics one can manage while wearing costume versions of heavy armor. The soldiers and common people alike wore garlands and processed along the Avetine Hill, blowing trumpets, carrying torches and leading along sacrificial animals. Sounds like a stomping good time.

I find it interesting that while Mars presided over the brute arts of war, the soldiers venerated Disciplina--the qualities that honed them into razor-sharp blades of the Empire--as a woman. It suggests that in accomplishing our goals, while it’s good to have a Fire in the belly, we also need Focus, Precision, and Persistence. We have to unite the Yin with the Yang.

How do we gather the qualities of Disciplina to us? In a recent stopover of a decidedly different flavor, Mysticism, I talked about the need for a daily practice of reflection and meditation, however brief. As inadequate as 15 minutes of such Practice might seem, it’s the constant return--like a drop of water etching a grove in the surface of a rock--that brings the Power. We almost have to suspend disbelief to hang in there. As we discussed during the visit to Activation, just as a single drop of water cannot rust the nail, a single day’s practice has no obvious Power.  But lined up over time, each brief segment created the line that makes that penetrating Edge.

So, if you haven’t done so today, get back to that quiet corner and grind that knife, if only for a single stroke.

May we see the gates of Disciplina, and perhaps make a home there.

Smiling

 Hey, hobo man,/ Hey Dapper Dan,/ You both got your style,/
But brother, you're never fully dressed without a smile!
-- “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile,” from the musical Annie, lyrics by Martin Charnin 

Today is the birthday of John Paul I, a Catholic Pope known both for his very brief reign (34 days) and for his down-to-earth Humility and Gentleness. Widely loved by the common folk, John Paul earned the nickname Il Sorriso di Dio (“God's Smile”). As a gay man raised Catholic with, shall we say, decidedly ambivalent feelings about the Church (ha!), I have unreserved admiration for John Paul. He was a spiritual bad-ass of the first order and worth learning about. So today I will honor him with an homage to the virtue of Smiling.  
Why do I, an Earth-worshipping/Buddhist weirdo, love John Paul I so much? First of all, like so many, I appreciate his Humbleness. John Paul was the first modern pope to speak in the singular form, using 'I' instead of the “royal we”--which so unnerved his traditionalist underlings that they re-wrote transcripts of his talks to show the formal plural pronoun!

John Paul also was the first to refuse the bejeweled papal tiara and the sedia gestatoria, a gilded, ostrich feather-laden palanquin or throne upon which he was carried to public events. (His staff convinced him to use it so that the large crowds lined up along the roads could see him, so he relented. But John Paul II, his successor, agreed with John Paul I that it was unnecessary, and it has not been used since 1978.) Instead of a “coronation,” John Paul had a simple “investiture” as Pope. When he was named as Patriarch of Venice, he, in his own words, “blushed to the roots of my hair.”

This Simplicity carried into his ministry. John Paul did not go in for gobbledegook jargon in his speeches, prefering plain talk that people could understand. In a talk to the priests of Vittorio Veneto, he explained the “teaching method of Jesus,” emphasizing the use of concrete images tied to the life of the people and concluding, “If only we all spoke as He spoke in the Gospel!” For this reason, John Paul I also earned the nickname “the Pope who spoke like Jesus.” He recalls the Czech virtue of Lidovost that we visited earlier this month.  

But John Paul was no pushover. He was gutsy. Those of you who cleave to a more feminine metaphor of the Divine may remember John Paul I’s famous statement during one of his Sunday addresses that “God is a father, even more a mother.” This electrified the world press, who interpreted his statement as revolutionary. Some felt it simply reminded the faithful that God shows Gentleness in addition to Power. On the other extreme, one reporter thought it meant Mary the Mother of God was being promoted to the Trinity! And a German article suggested John Paul might be (gasp!) a heretic. Blogger Lori Pieper explains that, rather than being heterodox, John Paul I’s view of God as both Big Mama and Big Papa was consistent with his words and speech all the way back through his priestly career.

The virtue of Smiling as shown to us by John Paul I derives from the root virtues of Humanity, Transcendence, and Temperance. When we are genuinely Smiling, we are tapping into qualities like Humor, Joy, Simplicity, Confidence, Humility, and Love. We’ve all heard that the act of Smiling can actually change our brain chemistry, and there’s scientific evidence to back this up. Smiling heals us and heals the people around us too, something called the “halo effect.”

So today, remember the Simplicity and Humility of the Smiling Pope, who gave up a jeweled tiara for a better raiment: Smiling. Try one on for size yourself. Remember, you’re never fully dressed without one!

May we see the gates of Smiling, and perhaps make a home there.

Mysticism

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.
--Saint Theresa of Avila

Today, October 14, is the anniversary of the death of the 16th Century Christian saint and mystic Saint Theresa of Avila, with tomorrow her feast day. Like so many mystics, Saint Theresa’s exhortations on walking the path to the Divine can be appreciated by anyone, I think, no matter what their particular faith tradition. Like Rumi, she is a friend to all of us. Her story brings to my mind the virtue of Mysticism.

As with many of the virtues featured here on TTV, Mysticism per se does not appear on any formal lists of traditional ethnic or religious values. However, I would claim that Mysticism represents an aspect of the virtue Spirituality, which traces to the universal human root virtue of Transcendence.

When I say “Mysticism,” you probably think of magical hermits or wandering sadhus, people far from you and me, shut off from the world to share secret knowledge or practices. And that’s not entirely wrong. Ironically, though, I am struck by how much of what mystics have to say applies across the whole living world from which they have withdrawn. Traditions of Mysticism are common to almost all world religions, from the Sufism of Islam, to the Vedanta lineage in Hinduism, to the Kabbalah of Judaism. The mystical state of union with the divine has been described virtually everywhere, whether called Te in Taoism, Moksha in Jainism, Satori in Zen Buddhism, or Ein Sof Ohr in Hassidic Judaism. Author Ben Gruagach argues in his book The Wiccan Mystic that Wicca, too, constitutes a path of Mysticism. Mysticism is the place where virtually all paths converge.

Almost all schools of Mysticism voice a belief in Immanence--the presence of Divine energy permeating all aspects of our material world. Another juicy paradox, since “Transcendence” implies that the Divine exists above/away from material life--explaining why so many of the mystics move out to remote mountaintop caves, lonely moors, or barren deserts. When I think of Immanence (and I’m showing my Buddhist bias here), I think about the teaching that Buddha-nature can be found in every single sentient being, although as with antique silver, we may need to apply a bit of elbow grease to buff off the tarnish and let it shine.

Saint Theresa devoted her entire adult life to mystic practice, although in her writing she admits she didn’t particularly seek out the path to mystic ecstasy--the path found her. There’s a nice summary of her biography here. As a contemplative Carmelite nun, she found her portal to the Divine through prayer. For the sisters who studied under her, Saint Theresa described three primary virtues as essential aspects for finding the Divine: Love, Detachment, and Humility. With my Buddhist training, I’m struck by how strongly this resonates with ideas about Maitri (Loving-Kindness--a virtue we touched on in our very last entry), Nekkhamma or non-attachment, and shedding of the ego. Patrick Burke, a Carmelite monk living in Ireland, gives a nice overview of Saint Theresa’s view on these virtues here.

For those of us caught up in the day-to-day world of life, work, filling out tax forms, washing the dishes or our children or our dogs--what does the virtue of Mysticism say to us? I think the answer lies in the notion of Immanence: we can find the Divine in those mundane details. Buddhist author Jack Kornfield talks about this in his book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, visiting many religious traditions as he explores this truth. As a teacher of prayer, Saint Theresa reminded her students of the importance of a daily meditation practice as a necessary foundation for progress on their spritual path. And so, I believe she reminds us to stake out a small corner of our busy lives for a daily practice of contemplation and reflection for at least a few minutes each day. We can hear the Divine in the rustle and bustle, but we have to listen.

May we see the gates of Mysticism, and perhaps make a home there.

Excellence

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
--Theodore “Ted” Logan

I’ve recently learned that Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are planning a third installment in their film series that started with the famous (or infamous) Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The news brought a grin to my face and a whimsical impulse to visit the virtue of Excellence, as defined by that wonderful example of goofball 80s SciFi comedy movies.

Normally the word “excellence” brings to mind driving ambition and images of necks bestrewn with gold-medals. We think of Excellence as being a quality of perfect performance, often attained with great effort.

What I love about Bill and Ted is that they turn that notion of Excellence all around. Rather than Excellence implying a race in which combatants ambitiously elbow out their inferiors for recognition, Bill and Ted define Excellence as a way of behaving towards others with Kindness, as in, “Be excellent to each other!” (They follow this with a reminder to find Joy in life’s day-to-day: “Party on, dudes!”)

I have to admit, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is not my usual cup of tea. (My friends know that in fact I strongly prefer films with two of any of the following: Cute Boys, Giant Bugs, and Explosions. Men in Black, The Fifth Element, and Starship Troopers are the rare examples that can claim all three. Despite the rest of the world’s opinion to the contrary, I do NOT consider Keanu Reeves as meeting the “cute boy” requirement, even back then. He just doesn’t float my boat. But, I digress... ) Still, the film grows on you. Bill and Ted perfectly capitulate the Tarot archetype of the Fool, and their adventure the Fool’s Journey. There’s something so guileless about them that you can’t help but like them and root for them.

The Excellence that that Bill and Ted preach--mostly by example, at least until they apparently become the founders of an advanced society of the 27th Century--is an aggregate virtue (much like Honor, which we saw contains ingredients like Discipline, Courage, and Fidelity.) I think Excellence as Bill and Ted define it would include bits of Kindness, Joy, Simplicity, and Innocence.

As such, Excellence reminds me of the Buddhist virtue Maitri. Often translated as “loving-kindness,” Pema Chodron explains that Maitri might be better translated as “unconditional friendliness.” Bill and Ted indeed seem to espouse a simple Friendliness to the various characters they encounter in space and time. And that’s excellent!

So today, tap into your inner Ted or channel your higher Bill, and bring that Joyful Friendliness of Excellence to the people around you. How do your words and deeds tell people to be excellent to each other, and to party on?

May we see the gates of Excellence, and perhaps make a home there.

Oh, and: San Dimas High School Football RULES!

Activation

No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist... Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living, conscious being that we're part of...
--Starhawk, Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Today, 10/10/10, the group 350.org sponsors a day of worldwide grassroots activism to bring awareness and action on climate change. As such, I felt the virtue of Activation would make an appropriate stop on our journey.

How might we define the virtue of Activation? When I first started to think about it, my mind turned to chemistry. In chemistry, molecules have to attain a certain level of energy in order to react and attain a transition state, whether that’s water and iron reacting to make rust, or soda and water reacting to make CO2. Given the goals of Bill McKibben’s 350.org, the chemistry definition seems an apt metaphor. After all, 350.org is trying to get citizens “fired up” to interact and attain a sort of “transition state” for our society.

In more formal virtues literature, however, we can also find discussion of Activation, in the form of “Active Citizenship,” which psychologists Seligman and Peterson describe as a manifestation of the root virtue of Justice. Just what experts mean by “Active Citizenship” is unclear, because it implies that citizens (of a nation, or the world) have certain responsibilities. While constitutions often spell out our rights as citizens, they rarely lay out our duties.

Still, in America (and all successful democracies), the health of society probably lies in how well its citizens carry out these poorly-defined responsibilities of citizenship, through voluntary efforts. One of the earliest observers of U.S. culture, Alexis de Toqueville, noted that the success of our nation’s infant democracy lay in the efforts of our many voluntary organizations. Americans did not wait for government to solve their problems. Instead, they reached out to their neighbors, whether through their churches, fraternal groups, or bowling leagues. (Well, I don’t think they had bowling leagues when de Toqueville visited, since the rules of bowling only got laid out in New York 60 years after his book was published. This was my half-joking allusion to Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, which talks about the decline of such civic organizations in the U.S.)

De Toqueville also pointed out the juicy paradox that Americans, who so cherish virtues like Independence and Liberty, would often harness themselves together to solve problems communally.

I think the goals of 350.org have obvious merit, a “books for nuns”¹ proposition if I ever heard it, and I urge any of you who haven’t signed the “Put Solar on It” petition to at least do that today. But I also admit that in the face of such overwhelming challenges like climate change, the actions of one little person can feel like a drop in the slowly-rising ocean. (I myself remember a pang of such despair after a long community activist meeting in the Castro three years ago, addressing the MRSA outbreak amongst gay men there.)

McKibben has faced criticism from his fellow activist Joe Romm, who feels that at the end of the day, it is the action of elected leaders in government that will actually realize the necessary changes.

Romm feels that, more than rallies and grassroots symbolic gestures, what we need are laws and government action compelled in the voting booth. Thus, he says a better use of people’s Activation lies in defeating California’s Prop 23, an oil company-sponsored bill that would undo some of Gov. Schwarzenneger’s progressive energy policies recently passed into law.

So, for those of you in California, make sure to vote next month, and get the word out to other voters to oppose Prop 23. If you want to get really ambitious, go door to door in the neighborhood, or mention Prop 23 at a meeting of any of your voluntary associations, be they religious, sororal, fraternal, or bowling. (Or any combination thereof.)  

It takes more than one drop of water to rust a nail. It takes more than one grain of baking powder to make a cake rise.

Starhawk has said that magic consists of the act of changing consciousness at will. For some people, that magic manifests in activism. That magic is Activation.

May we see the gates of Activation, and perhaps make a home there.


¹“Books for nuns”: In my personal lexicon, a cause that is so obviously good and innocuous that no one could oppose it. Who could oppose a charitable donation of books to an order of religious ladies? Only a fiend.