Altjeringa

The Dreamings made our Law.. This Law is our ceremonies, our songs, our stories; all of these things came from the Dreaming...These songs are sacred.
--Yanyuwa elder Mussolini Harvey, quoted in John Bradley’s Yanyuwa Country, 1988

Twenty-five years ago today, the Australian government returned to local Aborigines control over Uluru, more commonly known to us as Ayer’s Rock. This sandstone monolith, almost 6 miles around, rises over 1,000 feet over the central Australian outback. Once they received recognition of their land rights, the Pitjantjatjara tribe agreed to lease the site for 99 years back to the Australian park service. While the park continues to allow tourists to climb the rock, the native folk have asked tourists to refrain from climbing Uluru, out of respect for its sacredness as laid out in their lore. The story of Uluru made me want to pause today and consider the virtue aspects of Altjeringa (the Dreaming).  

First, remember that Westerners use the term “Aborigine” to refer to an entire continent of people. Just as Native Americans across North America represented hundreds of distinct languages, histories, and belief systems, so too do the natives of Australia contain a huge diversity of cultures.

Even so, we find the notion of Altjeringa across almost all Aboriginal cultures, though the specific term “Altjeringa” comes only from the Arrernte tribe of central Australia. The people who live around Uluru actually use the term Tjurkurrpa; tribes from elsewhere in the continent call the Dreaming by names such as Palaneri, Bugari, Wongar, or Ungud.

What is the Dreaming? After spending hours reading on this question, I conclude we have no easy complete English translation. I’d suggest “Eternal Spritual Power and Order, Spoken through Nature” as a rough beginning. For native Australians, the Dreaming refers in part to the Dreamtime, a “time outside of time” and spiritual plane from which rose the Ancestor Spirits who created the land, animals, and people in it. “The Dreaming” refers to the spiritual power in a place tracing back to the order of Creation. It also means the spiritual beliefs and practices of the people who live in the place.

Aborigines hold that the specific spirituality or “Dreaming” of a person comes from tapping into the power of a place, which expresses itself in local laws or customs guided by sacred ceremonies, song, and art. Individual persons living in a place have distinct Dreamings which they treat as intellectual property; an artist with a Honey Ant dreaming, for instance, must give permission for someone else to paint images related to that Dreaming. Certain sacred chants embed knowledge about specific places within them; the natives call the paths through the land (or sky) described in such music “Songlines.” (Recall most tribes kept a nomadic way of life until the arrival of the Europeans.) You can see an example of a Blue Wren Dreaming here:

Altjeringa constitutes a virtue inasmuch as native Australians uphold the Dreaming as the source of their ways of life--their Law. As such, we can see that Altjeringa represents Divine Order. As one commentator explained,

The Dreaming is met when people live according to law, and live the lore: perpetuating initiations and Dreaming transmissions or lineages, singing the songs, dancing the dances, telling the stories, painting the Songlines and Dreamings.

To me, Altjeringa recalls the Confucian virtue of Li, a word similarly hard to translate into English but that includes ideas like “customs,” “ritual,” and “proper behavior,” and refers to everything from songs and costumes, to food, to architecture, to expression of emotions and relations between blood relatives and strangers. Sometimes translators just shrug and call it “culture.”

Unlike other virtues, which have an invariable quality, the Order in Altjeringa will manifest differently from place to place and even from individual to individual. (As a member of the eclectic Reclaiming community I resonate with this!)   

Altjeringa brings to mind two other virtues we’ve visited recently. One is the Shinto virtue of Musubi, the Blooming or unfolding of a person or event harkening back to primal Divine powers of creation. Another is yesterday’s stopover, Abiding, which I found in a reverie on the Chartres cathedral and the Timelessness of the creative act, in which we shed our ego and touch the Divine--which may be simply another name for the Dreamtime.

Indigenous Australians believe that only an extraordinary state of consciousness allows one to attune to the Dreaming. For us, I think it serves as a reminder to take time for Listening to the world around us, and the sacredness of Nature, who today seems all-too-beleagered. As someone who has had my feet knocked out from under me in the past year, the Order and Beauty of the Dreamtime calling out to us through Nature holds appeal. It reminds me of the Mary Oliver poem, “Wild Geese”: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/ the world offers itself to your imagination,/ calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --/over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.”

Take a moment today to sit quietly in a natural setting that has meaning for you, whether that’s a favorite park filled with trees and birds, or the abandoned lot next door giving refuge to “weeds”  and insects. Can you tap into the Dreaming of the place? How does it speak to you? How do you honor it?

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

Abiding

Abide with me from morn to eve, / For without Thee I cannot live: / Abide with me when night is nigh. / For without Thee I dare not die.
-- John Keble, 19th century English poet, in his hymn “Sun of My Soul, Thou Saviour Dear”

On this date, 750 years ago, King Louis IX of France presided over the dedication of the magnificent Gothic cathedral at Chartres, famed for its splendor and magnificent stained glass. The Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres has captured the hearts of pilgrims and artists for the better part of a millenium. As with most medieval cathedrals, Chartres’ construction evolved over generations, leaving the identities of most of its architects and builders lost to the mists of time--a mystery all the more compelling for its beauty. For this reason, I will use this occasion to celebrate the virtue of Abiding.

The word “abide” has a plethora of meanings: To persist. To survive. To obey. To make a temporary home. To await--or simply, to wait. Thus, a taste of Abiding brings us a bouquet of flavors from such virtues as Patience, Endurance, Dedication, the Selflessness of submission, and just the merest hint of Eternity. What this all has to do with Chartres, I’ll explain below.

Chartres attracted pilgrims regularly for almost four hundred years before its dedication, due to a relic stationed at the church in 876 C.E. by the Holy Roman Emperor: The Sancta Camisia, a cloak supposedly worn by the Virgin Mary. By getting close to the old garment, visitors felt closer to the Mother of God. At least four previous church buildings had burned down before the modern cathedral began work, shortly after the last fire of 1194 C.E.

Intriguingly, the names of the builders of the magnificent structure remain unknown to modern-day scholars, who refer to the presumed main architect by the nickname “Scarlet.” Particular design details allow experts to discern the presence of at least two other designers, labelled “Bronze” and “Olive.” At any given time, each master builder directed nine teams of workers. They achieved the bulk of the building in a scant 30 years.

While I’ve studied its design in school, I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting Chartres in person, but it has a well-known awesome effect on visitors. One of them posted a casual view from inside the transcept, looking up at its lofty ceilings:

Modern-day artists and writers frequently comment about the striking contrast between the Majesty of its historic design, and the utter Namelessness of Chartres’ legions of designers and workers. Filmmaker Orson Welles, for instance, inspired by Chartres, made this comment:

Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life ... we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing.

And this, my fellow travelers, brings us to the message of Chartres. Welles walked right up to the edge of it, got close to the old garment, but did not quite take the leap of Faith it required. For it is not in its glass and stone that the Abiding of Chartres (ahem) abides. Chartres stands forth as a mortal commentary on Creativity and Appreciation-of-Beauty, emanations of the root virtues of Wisdom and Transcendence. Its workers submitted themselves to the creative act, certainly knowing that their dazzling edifice would make but a paltry echo of the heaven into which they hoped one day to enter. They subsumed themselves in the creative act. They abided the egolessness of Creativity.

We, too, know the magic of Chartre’s nameless makers. If you have ever simply picked up a crayon and colored a picture, or even watched a child do so, then you have known the Rapture and Surrender of the creative act. In the moment of creation, we shed the ego like the skin of  a snake, and join something greater. The refrain you can almost hear the builders of Chartres sing out to us through the dusty decades: Why scale the unforgiving vertical cliffs of materiality, when you can soar through the skies of Eternity? It is in their selfless Surrender to the creative fire that they, and we, transcend. The gorgeous cathedral they left us, is like the eggshell left behind by the hatching of an eagle. It is like a dusty cloak left behind by the Mother of Divinity.

Through many centuries, while its gifted makers surrendered to the timeless depths, Chartres abides. And they abide in Chartres. It abides its time. And it abides us.  

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

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.