I dTóiceo Beag

Cheannaigh muid an triúr seo i dTóicio Beag faoi deireadh. Bhí Léna agus mé ag fánacht lasmuigh as siopa mór nuair bhreathnaim Leon, ár mhac is sine, isteach an siopa céanna iomlán na bréagáin anime ón tSeapáin, ar ndóigh.

Bhí maith liom an bhó bhocht ar dtús. Ansin, thug Léna faoi deara an cailín ó spás. Ar deireadh, dá haire mé an úlchabháin ag eitlilt.

Mar sin, bhí trí againn. Dúirt an comhartha: "trí haghaidh ar an praghas de deich dollar." D'iarr sí an cléireach chun iad a fháil amach as an fhinneoig domhain.

Beidh siad a bheith ina cuimhneacháin ar ár dinear go Suehiro agus ár siúl a chéile mar triúr ag imeall ar lár ann i gCathair na hÁingeal. Beidh Leon ar ais go an Ollscoil i dTailte Dearg go luath. Agus, beidh ag dul ár mhac is óige Niall go Colaiste na Mac an Bhaird ar an am a léifidh tú seo freisin chomh maith. 

Suí na deilbhiní sa seomhra folctha. Thúg mé grianghraf in aice leis doirteal thuas staighre. Tá súil agam nach bhfuil na cáit iad a ionsaí.

In Little Tokyo.

We bought this trio in Little Tokyo recently. Layne and me waited outside the large store when Leo, our older son, looked inside the same shop full of anime toys from Japan, of course.

I liked the poor cow first. Then, the space girl drew the attention of Layne. Finally, I took note of the owl flying.

Therefore, we had three. The sign said: "three for the price of ten dollars." She asked the clerk to get them out of the deep window.

They will be a souvenir of our dinner at Suehiro and our walk as a trio together around the center of Los Angeles. Leo will go back to the University of Redlands soon. And also, our younger son Niall will be going to Bard College by the time you read this, as well.

The figurines sit in the bathroom. I took a photo near the sink upstairs. I hope the cats will not attack them.

Vernon Sproxton's "Teilhard de Chardin": Book Review

This unprepossessing introduction from a Christian press in 1970 may seem basic, but it's well written and ideal for those needing a straightforward account of this maverick Jesuit paleontologist's daring theology which sought to ennoble the material by refusing to keep it apart in dualistic models from the spiritual. In his introduction, the author credits this "vision" for guiding some who, soured by Christian dogmatism distanced from the modern world, but also bitter about "a nihilism which betrayed their deepest intuitions," found their way back to a religion better suited to their aspirations.

Avoiding the more "uncritical adulation" of some of Teilhard's New Age followers, Sproxton as a minister and BBC producer of Religious Programmes brings the telling detail of the documentary format to enliven a formidable subject. It's for beginners. He opens in the Auvergne, where amidst nearly a prehistoric, rocky and barren landscape of the Massif Central in the same town where Pascal was born, young Pierre Teilhard began his life's work, "tracing the lineaments of Christ in solid rock."

Upset at the fleeting nature of matter, for his favorite iron talisman soon rusted, the boy sought reconciliation with the intangible energy.  "Even then he was seeking an Idea which would embrace his own frail mortality and the constancy of solid rock. He was then seven years old." (22)

Called to the priesthood, he bristled against the pious platitudes, searching for an intellectual coherence leading to a combination of the seen and unseen. While his apparent welcoming of the unleashed energy that sparked WWI unsettled me, his service in the trenches as a chaplain attests to his bravery and commitment to an ideal. He lived within his idealistic time; a loyal Frenchman and a Catholic cleric, he displays his class and era's mindset even as his scholarship sought to transcend it.

Nearly thirty by the time he was let out into society as it were, he learned then of evolution. Whether in France or in Egypt, China or England, the young Jesuit tried to leap out of the bounds keeping Christ on one side and fossils on the other. Rocks and spirit, for Teilhard, both carried vitality. He coined "noosphere" as the "thinking layer  consisting in mankind, its interrelatedness, technology, culture and spiritual values." By "hominisation," in Sproxton's summary, "upright, reflective, thinking Man" emerges as a phenomenonology that challenges us "to see or to perish" (58-9). An evangelist, according to his critic, Teilhard longed to find within the soil the release of the transcendental.

Sproxton takes us in chapter 4 through what Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man delineated best. Organisms, sparked into biology's progression, use "a process of becoming" over immense duration in "cosmogenesis." With the end of perfection in Christ in mind and matter, somehow, tangential energy accrues. Combined with radial energy's bursts, evolution continues down blind ends (evil may be accounted for in this theodicy as a kind of waste by-product) or more direct alleys towards primates and humans. Within the latter, the opportunities for advancement allow the greatest ability for "amorsiation" or love which attracts each to each and by "directed chance," a move towards an Omega Point of unity and ultimate absorption of the material within the immaterial will arrive.

This remains despite Sproxton's efforts, and no fault of his own as he may well acknowledge, not crystal clear. Teilhard seems to have remained eager but rather naive when came to the horrors of both great wars, and he praises the chance for energy unleashed by the H-bomb. Despite the privations of wartime China and postwar France he witnessed, he appears (perhaps his quiet nature and resilient attitude dominated) to have detached himself from much of the half century during which Teilhard struggled to articulate his vision to those lacking faith. Original sin is thankfully diminished to the credit of Teilhard if not his superiors. With little patience for the human side of Christ, Teilhard yearned for a overpowering, immanent, omnipotent, and mystical "Christification."

Yet "God" rarely appears in Sproxton's precis. As Sproxton observes, the lack of critique which Teilhard brought to the Church (despite his own censure by Jesuits and scrutiny of the Holy Office) puzzles, but the patience with which the priest endured his later years of polite ostracism by certain authorities attest to the confidence and childlike faith that Teilhard kept as he was sent from China to Paris and then to New York. One wonders, decades after 1955, the fate of his body, buried humbly at the Jesuit novitiate on the Hudson--now the flagship campus for the Culinary Institute of America.
(Amazon US 7-5-13)

Augustine Thompson's "Francis of Assisi": Book Review

A clearly written, sober study, which moves through many controversies smoothly and past much hagiographical supposition, Fr. Augustine Thompson, a Dominican friar, examines the life of the founder of his counterpart Order, that of the Fratres Minores, or lesser brothers, today's Franciscans. Unlike earlier leaders such as Benedict or Bernard, this Umbrian soldier turned zealot for the Gospel's radical core of simplicity and poverty chose as his followers' exemplar not a rule, but himself.

That example, as Thompson interprets the record, reveals a less sanguine figure, and a more troubled man. After being taken prisoner of war in his youth, and after undergoing what appears a sort of trauma, his guilt and "self-loathing" distanced himself from his former pleasures and worldly pursuits. Unhinged by violence and a secret failing that haunted him, he fled. He sought the solitude of broken-down churches or natural settings, and Pietro de Bernardone's son, in Thompson's view, broke with the inheritance he would assume and sought the protection of clergy symbolically and practically by an impractical life led as a lay penitent, in a time when such affiliation might lead the fervent Christian to be regarded with suspicion by the clergy and by Rome.

André Vauchez' critical biography of the life and afterlife of St. Francis (Amazon US shorter and PopMatters longer reviews) covers the same material. Like that scholarly study, this academic but accessible companion book came out last autumn, before the election of Pope Francis I, and is reissued with a quick preface to commemorate the coincidence. But while Prof. Vauchez emphasizes the motley nature of the first followers of Francesco, and the fractious nature of the organization he had to lead, Fr. Thompson opts for a nuanced, if less detailed, account that features an overwhelmed, restless aspirant to a stripped-down life that like himself valued the action and the gesture over the word. Deeds mattered more, and what he preached did not add up to as much as how he meant his devotion. That is what moved ordinary people, noblemen, and even the Vatican to accept his driven, imperative, immediate desire to convert one's life to a radical dependence on manual labor, begging alms if necessary, and a disdain for rules that bound other religious men and women to convention.

Whether with Pietro or with the prelates who had to deal with headstrong Francis of Assisi, Thompson lets us view this man from society's perspectives too. He has a penchant for self-dramatization, and his relationship with his father gets some balance here compared to the usual slant; likewise his mission begins not with his staged renunciation of his inheritance before the bishop of his home city, but later among the lepers, and this too is more gradual than sudden, in Thompson's careful chronology. He did not pursue any clandestine romance with Clare, and Thompson shows far less contact over the years as well as initially with her than popular depictions lead us to imagine.

Rather than opposing the Church, this vehement reformer is very much eager to find papal patronage and eventually the sponsorship of a highly placed cardinal to run his Order a runaway success that Francis never appears to have envisioned for what were a few dropouts from the clergy, along with scattered folks across society. The bold distinction, played up by Vauchez but barely noticed by Thompson, is the choice to give up wealth and not to live off of alms, at least in the original intent of the peripatetic, come-what-may attitude of the few "brothers of poverty." He later begs to be commanded by those he appoints as his own superiors, so eager is he to enact obedience. No bureaucrat, by 1220 Francis seeks early retirement and, one senses, would like to run to the woods.

While nature itself is not pantheistic, while Francis did not deny himself or the friars meat, and while he saw this denial as needlessly promoting a false piety reminiscent of the monastic habit, Francis did respect the natural order and its creatures as manifestations of an unforced, innate spiritual presence. His extremism and his humor, his wit and his intransigence combine in this straightforward telling into a "spiritual bricolage" which demands that those who want to live with and as Francis did: this must enter into a less coherent realm where meaning does not carry the same force as action on behalf of the Eucharist and the suffering Christ. Certainly the stigmata (as protruding skin wounds in the form of nails) in all its mystery lurks here.

The Passion drove Francis to weep; one gets from these pages a man carried away by his emotion, ever since the years after his military service, and one moving between periods of darkness and intervals of ecstasy. He never meant to be a leader, he resembled at his start a "pious hanger-on" around ramshackle ecclesiastical establishments, and his unprepossessing and gawky short stature failed to carry the gravitas that apparently his sincerity did: even the Sultan in Egypt respected him.

Yet, respect by the movement Francis started as a fraternity of lay penitents living precariously by manual labor in a run-down stable, soon grew by his charism into a massive Order, organized under Cardinal Hugolino's asked-for guidance into a more monastic, and clericalized, institution. Thompson regards those lamenting this shift as romantics, and he explains how the various rules, exhortations, canticles, and testaments attributed to Francis integrate themes of penitence, fear of hell, discipline, and compromises with poverty as lepers and the poor needed to be cared for with funds. Like the allowance of meat for friars, such adjustments from a radical foundation to a Catholic organization carried with them inevitable acceptance of a less-idealized imperative to deal with real-world suffering. Compassion was often lacking in Francis. His irritability belies the popular depiction of a preacher to birds and beasts, and Thompson calmly documents the difficulties, physical and psychological, that plagued Francis as he sought retirement from running the Order and by 1223, turned into a power behind those whom he had urged to take over administratively the tasks of supervising thousands of friars. Priests began to enter and take over the Order, blurring its distinction.

What mattered most was deeds, not bureaucracy or poses. "For Francis, Catholicity was about things and actions, not just about ideas. His greatest fear, as he lay on his sickbed, was that those who came after him would replace his homely piety with the pride of intellectualized abstractions and assumption of religious status." Manual labor gave way to begging as a way to keep the Order running; priests and clerics might study as a form of work, and the lay community envisioned by Francis ca. 1209 by the early 1220s appears to have been subsumed into the Church, attesting to the draw the Order had for priests and students attracted to its fresh experiment. Francis lived long enough to lament and fear the diminution of his expanding Order into this institutionalization, but in a time when lay movements were suspected for heresy, there doesn't seem much of an alternative.

This is a scholarly book, with a large bibliography and a steady, unruffled sense of this subject's power. Thompson ends his biography neatly, to show how Elias, who ran the Order, managed to set up in the Assisi basilica in 1230 a series of concrete tombs designed to safeguard the rapidly canonized saint from rival Perugia--the same city that Francesco had fought against on the side of his hometown once. Before he died, he approached the state of a living relic, and his appeal--although a subject for Vauchez rather than Thompson--attests to his sway in piety and popular culture ever since.
(Amazon US 7-20-13)

André Vauchez' "Francis of Assisi": Book Review

Scoured of romanticism and all the more relevant as a new Pope selects this saint as his namesake, this new biography of Francis by an eminent medievalist skilled in the social construction of holiness signals a welcome and timely arrival. Appearing in friar Michael F. Cusato's smooth translation from the French last autumn, its paperback reprint so rapidly may attest to the alignment of the sudden shift at the Vatican with renewed interest, nine centuries later, about the Poor Man of Assisi. His career, centered in the same Italy and buffeted by conflicts from that same Rome, roamed as far as Egypt as he parleyed with Sultan Al-Kamir during the disastrous Fifth Crusade.

That bold foray reminds us of how a courtly young man from modest origins but social ambitions determined to realign power structures--to extend the conventional reach of Catholicism. André Vauchez stresses the need for detachment by modern observers from the legendary tales he analyzes which have been passed off as pious non-fiction since the thirteenth century. Any honest connection to Francis and his companions' irretrievable era, Vauchez admits, must first acknowledge the distance between the fervor and mindset of medieval believers and our own. Only then "does it become legitimate to ask ourselves what it is in the life and witness of the Poor Man of Assisi that still interests us". (xiii)

Around 1206, after a life of unspecified "sin" which featured a stint as a knight against Perugia followed by a year as a prisoner of war, Francesco de Bernardone fell ill and reflected. He resolved to live in the world but against it, appealing to the gospel call for radical evangelicalism. At twenty-five, he rejected his father Pietro's jurisdiction. To respectable Assisi, this cloth merchant's son appeared a well-raised ladies' man turned wayward madman, as he consorted with lepers and dwelt in a ruined stable by the swamps. Beyond the city walls, his rustic residence proved symbolic: Francesco chose to turn away his father as he turned around his loyalty. He placed himself--allegedly naked and symbolically then cloaked by the bishop's mantle--under ecclesiastical protection. No outlaw, Vauchez situates his subject within this "logic of exclusion": Francis joins the outcasts.

Rather than fleeing the city, as hermits and monks, those restless and resentful of a Church more concerned with clerics than with the Gospel flocked to Francis. He marginalized himself, beside those inside as well as outside cities, socially displaced by economic expansion as feudalism gave way to capitalism. Francis never aimed to found a religious order, but others took notice.

Voluntary poverty, Vauchez explains, drew nobles and the emerging middle class to Francis' idealism. Around 1209, they became "little brothers", Friars Minor approved by the pope as legitimate when fears of heresy by similarly countercultural factions had created papal crackdowns upon many who revived the ascetic directives of wandering bands and lay communes eager to imitate the wandering apostles. Allied with simple peasants and unlettered workers, a few rapidly expanded into thousands of friars. They, for a while, "restored to the Beatitudes a timeliness they had lost for centuries". (38)

Vauchez's interpretation of how Francis acted upon one of the harsher demands of the gospels undergoes his scrutiny. Did Francis travel across the Mediterranean to seek martyrdom at the hands of the Muslims whom he and his fellow Catholics barely understood, or did he seek to convert the sultan in Egypt and end the Fifth Crusade? Alternately, did Francis advance, as Vauchez prefers to suggest, a peacemaker's role, aware of Jewish and Islamic differences, yet integrating them into tolerance? After all, from Francis' time onward, Franciscans continue to occupy Holy Land shrines as chosen custodians, recognized by all peoples of the Middle East as appointed caretakers. While Vauchez appears to choose of the three rationales for Francis' mission the one meshing best with our contemporary ideals, he makes his case based on a careful reading of eyewitness reports proving that this dramatic exchange of mendicant and potentate occurred, cross-referenced in verified chronicles.

The tendency for gossip and adoration to inflate popular claims about Francis--as rumors of his piety spawned miracles straight out of the gospels and imitated heroism imported from saints' lives of wonder workers--means that separating hagiography from veracity frustrates any historian. The legend had already begun to overwhelm this physically unassuming but spiritually sincere man, who wore himself out with austerities and fervor. By 1219, leading his Fratricelli of little brothers turned international fellowship left an overwhelmed Francis seeking help from the Vatican. Gradually this Ordo Fratrum Minorum turned into an organization. Inevitably, the early charism of its stunted, homely founder--who when he preached turned eloquent preacher--faded.

He had returned from the Holy Land ill, and from 1220 on, Francis delegated authority and served his brethren more by example than words, to imprint his example upon (or even shock) those whom he directed. He both tore down and built up his holy reputation. This "extreme tension" in Vauchez's analysis dominates the final six years of his life.

In an "upside-down world", Francis rejected money's reduction of all people and things to their exchange value. Instead, his "minority" invited all Christians to see the face of the Crucified One "in our poverty and our infirmity"--as its founder reflected when he entered the ranks of the destitute.

Increasing solitude, the reception of that Crucified One's visible wounds as the stigmata (an issue handled by his biographer with tact), heightened anxiety over the discipline of friars after what had been a casual acceptance in the early years of unsuitable candidates: these for Vauchez add up to Francis' opposition to his Order's "culture of results". A hierarchy of priests within its membership and of bishops overseeing it left the free-spirited nature of its origins compromised, if inevitably. Papal, legal, and clerical functionaries imposed restrictions and compromises, as all feared heresy.

Francis' death in 1226 was followed rapidly by his canonization. A giant basilica grew over his grave. Assisi figured to rake in pilgrimage profits while the commune grumbled over taxes. Rome maneuvered to capitalize on the saint's sanctity to counter competing Italian and European interests. This led to the cult of the saint, and the popularization of the Poor Man. Quickly after his death, his fellow citizens rushed to spirit his body into the walls of the city, so as to lay claim to a new patron.

O.F.M. soon signified a bureaucratic entity, faithful to the Church's bidding despite the friars' emergence defined by a fundamentally fierce rejection of any property. Rome required stability, fearing radical or non-clerical dissension. The Order decided against its founder's wishes for freedom loyal to the gospel, to avoid attachment to any earthly goods. This would fracture the Franciscans into persecuted, dissident Spirituals with a strict observance, and the Community, a majority (some later to be called Conventuals) dwelling in convents, owning them and the goods they required. Even during the life of Francis--given the Order's need for training learned friars who used books and erected holy edifices--practical demands for possessing "immovable goods" clashed with its founder's desire to open a movement to all men and women, based on the itinerant and property-less Christ.

The middle third of Vauchez's study examines the medieval aftermath of Francis' life; his fanciful or sober biographers in a dozen accounts and his posthumous handlers shaped impressions which Giotto's allegorical, dreamlike murals for Assisi's basilica (this book lacks illustrations, diminishing its usefulness as a study of his "afterlife") commemorated for visitors, from around the year 1300.

"Whereas the rules and constitutions tended to fix and thus freeze Francis' spiritual experience and whereas the bulls of canonization betrayed it, the hagiographical account of his deeds calls for a creative assimilation of his message." (187) Despite conveying this aesthetic by text alone, Vauchez explains the transmission of a man with a stigmata, preaching among birds and to a wolf, and whose envisioned apostolate resembled in lore and depiction the deeds of his divine exemplar and predecessor.  An idealized Francis as "alter Christus" (a "second Christ") had replaced whatever living memory had sustained as testimony to the Poor Man from Assisi. 

This angered Protestants. A 1542 attack compared the Franciscan legendary texts to the Qur'an, both daring to supersede the Bible. Voltaire would favor noble Saladin over fanatical Francis. Goethe visited Assisi to see its ruined Temple of Minerva, but he never bothered with the enormous basilica.

Yet the Grand Tour popularized in the early nineteenth century revived sympathy for that city's patron saint and leading attraction. Another parallel emerged. Francis as a New Adam, an model of natural simplicity, appealed to intellectuals and artists seeking an alternative to clerical ideology and political conformity. By century's end, Paul Sabatier's influential biography consolidated two new versions of Francis. As proto-Renaissance "troubadour of genius," au courant with French chansons, and as an anticlerical proto-Protestant reformer, this humanist pioneer captivated more worldly Europeans.

This part of Vauchez's study rushes by in seventeen pages. Far too little for far too great an influence. Tolstoy praised Francis; Antonio Gramsci denigrated him, but for both reactions, we barely hear why. We learn only in an aside the Peace Prayer attributed to Francis was never penned by him; it comes from the end of the nineteenth century. The impact of Francis on the environmental movement, and the recent ecumenical peace meetings held (at least until Pope Benedict's suppression after he was elected) at Assisi combine for but a page and a half of coverage.

Instead, this medieval historian explicates upon Francis' own writings. A simply educated layman, he never possessed a complete Bible. He centered his life not on learning, but around the spiritual transformation of those who wished not to reject the workaday realm but to live in it, renewed. "He does not flee the world; he plunges himself into it without prejudice or ulterior motive because, if it is necessary to renounce the possession of goods and creatures it is legitimate for one to enjoy them on the condition that their enjoyment be referred to the One who has given such things to us for our own good." (282) He eloquently paraphrases the mentality of Francis. As here, Vauchez guides his secular or religious readers into the complexity beneath the birdbath statue, or the bearded brown-clad fellow.

Never reducing Francis to a homespun rabblerouser pitted against a recalcitrant bureaucracy, Vauchez propounds Francis as not a social reformer, but a prompter of a "second conversion of the world to the Gospel message, through which men and women would be able to recognize once again the infinite love which God had shown them and consequently to behave in like manner in their relations with each other and creation". (287)

But the Church welcomed Francis and his upstarts without "really understanding the whole import and meaning of his message". (292) Vauchez places Rome's integration of his movement into its framework as the only way Francis' "intuition" could have been safeguarded and transmitted, so it endured. As Francis has been daringly or foolishly equated with Christ for at least eight centuries, this unsettling comparison may be oddly appropriate: it kept his followers as well as his detractors writing about his astonishing gambit, to live as Jesus did, without goods or cares. For a time, it worked. Compromised, the movement survives. For Vauchez, this is better than the alternative. His presentation of this Umbrian knight turned "poor and begging" imitator of Christ proves as fascinating and debatable as the Man from Galilee whom the Poor Man of Assisi tried to emulate.

(To PopMatters 5-3-13; in shorter and altered form 4-19-13 to Amazon US. Cf. Fr. Augustine Thompson's recent sober, scholarly "Francis of Assisi: A New Biography" 7-20-13 at Amazon US)

"Occupying Spirituality, Evolving Dharma": Review article

Two books appearing this autumn connect “sacred activism” with principled, peaceful opposition to the dominant political and economic--as well as religious--system. Two years after Occupy Wall Street and hundreds of encampments and a few strikes, while the American prominence of the movement has faded, worldwide if scattered resistance continues. Focusing on domestic possibility, Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko in conversation relate their stories and create an agenda in Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation (Berkeley: North Atlantic, Sept. 3, 2013). Jay Michaelson shares their ideal, if from an arguably more specific perspective, as his title Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment (Berkeley: North Atlantic, Oct. 15, 2013) indicates. This review explores their intersections, and summarizes their visionary themes, beginning with the Occupy book.

Matthew Fox’s position may be better known. Now seventy-two, this post-Catholic, ex-Dominican priest left his Order after his nemesis Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) expelled him. Fox’s insubordination, and his defiant preaching of a gentle Creation Spirituality, counters the clerical patriarchy. This led to his current position as an elder statesman for a democratized, inclusive, tolerant community where lay men and women seek no permission to form an alternative to a moribund Church. 

Adam Bucko, raised in Solidarity-era Poland, came of age with anarchists who represented another type of revolt against authority. Now thirty-seven, he immigrated to New York City in his late teens and busked in the subway. After a stint in an ashram abroad, he returned to minister to homeless youth as a co-founder of the Reciprocity Foundation. This offers a “post-religious” approach that encourages young people to recover from shattered lives. Then, however suits them, they incorporate solutions they choose to begin to heal themselves. Gradually, they learn to trust and help others to regain confidence.

Main Street, Fox sees, follows congruent circles, as folks look each other in the eye. Wall Street imposes a top-down model, full of ladders. Solidarity, opposed to hierarchy, thrives on a lateral network Bucko knows well from his childhood. Given Fox’s direction as a veteran architect of alternative arrangements and with Bucko’s energy as a motivated activist, the two chart a “spiritual democracy” that appeals to the burgeoning majority of “post-traditional” nonaffiliated youth who are “spiritual but not religious.” While “nones” may be open to contemplation, they may enter it far from a place of conventional worship. Originating from life rather than from concepts, this approach expects relevance. Rooted not only in the soul but in creativity, a via positiva and negativa of exploration, and insights through self-guided transformation, Fox and Bucko present their path of a “yoga” or “discipline” grounded in “art as meditation” and open to an eclectic entry into unexpected lifestyles offering portals to discovery. 

Justice-based yet flexibly applied, celebratory while moral, this process evolves into a vocation, a calling. Although many counterparts to Bucko (and even if elder Fox does not admit it, many past Bucko’s cohort as well) lack permanent occupations or steady careers, the likelihood that hordes of free spirits will be able to uproot themselves to start over in their experimental urban communities may be quixotic. Much of this exudes a detached sensibility (Occupy is described often as if enduring and ongoing, which makes one curious about when this manuscript was drafted). Even with long-shot chances of success as real rules for radicals, it may serve as such texts have often done, as a manifesto. 

“The earth is burning up, and Rome (and religion in general) is playing fiddle.” Fox confronts injustice and inequality in scattershot if memorable fashion, as a rebels do. He integrates his medieval (and Dominican) mentors Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart imaginatively in support of his impassioned renewal. He applies his fellow ex-Dominican, the poet William Everson, astutely to show the realization of a vocation, far beyond the definitions of the clergy or the celibate. Bucko blends the formation of homeless youth into his own personal quest. Both convincingly prod the reader to imagine a more fulfilled reinstatement of the insights gained from prayer and reflection before one must return to everyday duty. Both men strive to inspire others to not only meditate but to create, by relationships and at work, social equality and soulful equanimity. A cyclical rather than a linear direction points the way.

Another Fox, George, founded the Quakers. Matthew Fox agrees with George’s message: the mystical experience can be entered by all seekers. No ritual or gathering need exclude anyone. Intergenerational wisdom, mentoring, relationships, integrity all flourish from grace-filled inspirations, hearkening back in Fox’s lively credit given to a gay, bohemian, New York predecessor, Walt Whitman. Out of these ecumenical voices, joined by many shamans across and beyond denominations and lifestyles, a New Monasticism lived in rural or urban areas might be invented. Chastity could be replaced by a vow of sexual responsibility. Poverty turns to a just economy and restored ecology. Obedience shifts into a vow to advance democracy. Gordon Gekko (an analogy the authors missed) boasted a Wall Street reptilian brain, fixated on greed and need. The higher neural levels, evolved for mammals, encourage the kind of communal cooperation that “base communities” and urban renewal reveal as principled alternatives. 

Occupy Spirituality ends as does Evolving Dharma. Both nod to Lama Surya Das. He adds an effusive afterword to the first book and his analogy sparks the reflections of the author of the second book under review. Lama Surya Das estimates that Western Buddhism now is but in its teens. This follows its Beat-hippie era infancy and its childish stages during the Me Decade and Generation X. It’s time to call for a responsible rite of passage into maturity among its still awkward North American practitioners. 

Jay Michaelson credits this same Long Island-born guru for guidance into a less selfish, more ethical phase of Buddhism. Similar to the former Jeffrey Miller’s fusion of American sensibilities with Himalayan heritage, his near-neighbor (and contemporary of Bucko) Michaelson organizes his investigation of an engaged, politically savvy, and sensibly skeptical Buddhism by a traditional Tibetan pattern--surveying the ground, following a path, and coming to fruition. But Michaelson’s approach in Evolving Dharma departs from what typically will be found next to this briskly paced but well-documented study on a bookstore’s shelf. Rather than inspirational guff or dry scholarship, this blends personal with political outlooks. (As a boy he was nicknamed “Chatterduck”; his brainy but quirky narrative stays energetic.) 

As a Ph.D. in Jewish thought, a law professor, a start-up entrepreneur, prolific author, and as a gay man who for years denied his sexuality, Michaelson applies his experiences through an insistent examination of the potential of meditation to change society. He attaches this to a platform for Buddhist alternatives designed for those dissatisfied with our corporate, consumerist, ecological, and economic injustices.

While he avoids reducing meditation to quietism, or spirituality to narcissism (he critiques if in a discreet endnote critics advocating this facile equation such as neo-Marxian materialist Slavoj Žižek), Michaelson displays a faith in meditation drawn from his own eager pursuit of Jewish Kabbalah and Buddhist “attainments.” Hindsight adds caution; his discussion of “mindhacking” as akin to muscle-building, and stimulating “regions of the brain associated with compassion and with self-regulatory activity” causing one to hold back before acting unwisely, may lead some to hesitate at Michaelson’s enthusiasm. Still, his abundant documentation cites neurological studies supporting his (admittedly contentious) claims. 

He explores “feedback loops” compatible with Fox and Bucko’s approval of Occupy’s mass assemblies emerging into collective agreement. Michaelson links lateral organization and patient consensus to social as well as spiritual reform. He decries a “neo-macho hacker ethos” that drowns “soft” voices; he notes the restive, fractious nature of certain Buddhists online. This is the first book to my knowledge to acknowledge not only Buddhist Geeks and those who minister to the “dharma punx” or “hardcore Zen” versions of today’s sangha, but dissenters Glenn Wallis (Speculative Non-Buddhism) and Matthew O’Connell (Post-Traditional Buddhism). Michaelson does not push iconoclasm as far as the latter pair does, preferring to remain within semi-conventional if experimental or LGBT-compatible enclaves, but the range of those he includes provides a useful guide into diversity, beyond it as a cliché or buzzword.  

Such “open source dharma” invites an escape from what Michaelson in meditation labels as “fetishizing the trigger.” Buddhists warn against confusing the finger pointing the way to the moon with the orb itself; as Michaelson reasons, “mistaking a state for It can have real political consequences.” His critical correction aligns with the refusal of Occupy Spirituality to cling to approved, hidebound solutions to new problems. Outmoded hierarchies, exotic rituals perpetuating another culture’s mentalities, dependence on pampered leaders, sexually predatory gurus, power structures that favor the privileged need not be reincarnated. Americans pursuing liberation can reject these attachments. Fundamentalism, as Fox learns the hard way in opposing the Vatican, thrives on separating one ritual, one religion, one experience as true and all others as false. Eventually an honest meditator (or an agitator) confronts his or her intransigence. Freed from conventional roles, actions to sustain deeper change may beckon.

This conservatism, a passive condition content with sit-ins if on a cushion more often than at barricades, has hobbled Buddhist transformation in the wake of a sometimes complacent counterculture. “’Be here now’ won; ‘strive diligently to gain your liberation,’ at least in a developmental sense, lost.” As a practical move forward from disengagement, able to balance solitude with activism, Michaelson champions Daniel Ingram’s pragmatic dharma, a “developmental model of awakening” even if as an eager Michaelson notes, he does not confuse the map for the territory, as he advances towards insight. 

He tells of the “dark night” that opens up for those higher on the mystical climb he recounts. One wonders--as he hints in the use of “mindfulness” for executives that such exposure leads to dropouts from the Wall Street Fortune 500 rat race-- what might be its bottom line impacts on the corporate drones as well as the worker bees. Mindfulness turns a commodity in healthcare, the military, careers, and education, and while Michaelson moves too rapidly across these applications, they merit reflection.

The ground for Michaelson stretches over American and Western adaptations of the dharma; the path aligns with his own ascent along the lonely trail of hard-won insights within silence and by self-discipline. The fruition results with reintegrating “contemplative wisdom” into the mundane world. He ambles around how much integration for an “always disappearing,” secularizing, evolving dharma the past 2500 years might be necessary in contemporary contexts. Enriched by his queer advocacy, Michaelson embraces the famously elusive concept of non-self. He concocts “spiritual viscosity” as his metaphor to generate less “friction” in his encounters with those who oppose his liberal thrust. He understands well from his legal expertise and academic training how fluid definitions sidle into changing identities of gender, sexuality, and fidelity. One aside lingers: given the persistence of sexual and financial abuses within the Buddhist community in the West as leaders entangle followers, Michaelson advises the BDSM community’s safe guidelines might serve as a template for those demanding induction into power-driven, guru-fixated relationships. He reminds readers that for mature adults in America, such roles seem outmoded, imported from a region or a mindset incompatible with democratic, egalitarian ideals. 

“Non-hierarchical, participant-driven dharma” certainly intersects with Occupy, Fox’s Creation-centered spirituality, and Bucko’s street-wise enterprise. Michaelson concludes that his same-sex marriage equality activism exemplifies a method of face-to-face, if incremental, change. Fox and Bucko discussed the replacement of the reptilian Wall Street grasp with the Main Street mammalian embrace. Michaelson advises a lovingkindness meditation that reduces “reflexive anger” and “improves the capacity for compassion.” This modest, personal touch—dealing with stress by easing tension-- strengthens the firm but pliable outreach which Occupy offers as our hope for unselfish ethical reform. 

As with Occupy Spirituality, there persists in Evolving Dharma a sense of a hovering if rather shaded disconnect with daily life and job realities of most Americans. As Bucko and Fox must realize, in this job market, tens of millions will not quit the campus, the factory, corporation, local business, or big-box outlet to start over laboring for justice at a prototype of Fox’s New Monasticism such as Oakland’s Canticle Farm or within Bucko’s Reciprocity Foundation. Fox speaks as a wise “elder” to Bucko (and Michaelson’s) generation, but for those burdened by bills, bosses, and debt, what options remain for seekers who cannot follow Michaelson to retreat to a Nepalese monastery for months of silent sitting?  

He aspires to install “better cognitive software in people of all political persuasions.” He ponders which of Aldous Huxley’s predictions will transpire. Island imagined “moksha” as a harmless chemical enlarging wisdom and compassion. Brave New World invented “soma” which “stupefies more than it enlightens.” 

Michaelson strives to not only “bring the Dharma to the Occupy Movement as Adam Bucko described,” but to carry the “ethos” of anti-globalization movements, Burning Man, and other participant-created communities to the dharma. Whether this perpetuates or diminishes the marginalization of such grassroots, homespun, and small-scale efforts as Bucko’s foundation and Matthew Fox’s reaction against the coffers of Wall Street, the Brothers Koch, Silicon Valley, Citizens United, the Department of Defense, Obama’s $1.1 billion vs. Romney’s $1 billion campaigns, or the 72% cited by Fox as the amount spent in our economy on consumption remains to be seen by the discerning reader and reflective activist.

(Published at New Clear Vision  in the review section as "Sacred Activism" July 10, 2013; "Occupy Spirituality" in shorter form and altered somewhat for Amazon US 9-15-13. "Evolving Dharma" likewise 10-15-13 for Amazon US)

Nathan Schneider's "Thank You, Anarchy": Book Review

Why a subtitled "apocalypse"? It derives from "the lifting of a veil," so when a fresh revelation appears, it transforms the past as well as the present: then, there's no going back, only forward. Fresh from finishing a study of attempts to verify the divine presence, God in Proof, Nathan Schneider, jittery and curious, reports "notes" from the revelations emanating from Occupy Wall Street in the late summer of 2011. He investigates an energy more tangible than most theology: yet sharing the spirited, mass appeal of what may elude those less fervent.

Idealistic enough to cheer on the Occupy protests, realistic enough to catalogue their failures, Schneider brings the same alert witness and affable analysis that his book on belief featured. As with any cabal of devotees, Occupy began with commitment by a spellbound few. Zuccotti Park, rechristened by the encampment with its pre-corporate name as Liberty Square, "was a place especially conducive to those of us with obsessive tendencies, who like to be consumed in a given interest or project to the exclusion of all else. There, the god of ordinary life was dead, resurrected in the business of self-reliance."

The difficulties of staying fed, wired (by caffeine and cellphones), and calm soon weighed upon Occupiers. Encircled by police at first and then the media and bystanders, as crowds grew in the autumn,demonstrators' tensions grew. Schneider contrasts the "rampant volunteerism" of the initial Wall Street-adjacent site squaring off against the iconic Charging Bull of financial acumen with Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. There, hesitation cowed those gathered to square off against political might. Occupiers in D.C. waited for "directives to come from on high."

Yet, when they did, such dicta were resented, by those complaining about the lack of democratic process. "There was a general assembly, but nobody seemed sure how to run it." Schneider distinguishes the "instinctive anarchists" (he chats with "anti-leader" David Graeber, one of the instigators of the core New York contingent) from those who flocked to enclaves while remaining unsure of their next move.

Certainly, the lack of "one demand" from Occupy met with media mockery and bipartisan disdain. Yet Schneider insists that the flexibility supported not only the disparate concerns but the diverse membership of protesters. He suggests how an "anarchist utopia" in economic, environmental, educational, and egalitarian terms turns transparent and liberating on a global, "open-source" scale.

While this glimpse remains brief, it sketches what Occupy envisioned beyond borders, fences, or property. A problem persisted. Those articulating direct "participatory democracy" tended to be white, male, and often with leisure or income to detach from workaday, less privileged or more dutiful adults unable to pitch a tent or stand in solidarity from dawn to dusk, let alone into the increasingly chilly nights. (Schneider notes the lack of parents, for example.) Still, Schneider nods in approval as those less used to taking command and speaking out began to do so. "Those used to talking had to learn to listen more, and those used to shutting up had to learn how to teach."

I can attest to the difficulties of this attitudinal adjustment, from my insights gleaned at Occupy L.A. and from friends who tried to channel the energy within enclaves as large as Oakland and small as a Sierra Nevada tourist destination; those used to being in charge (often with pedigrees from counterculture, global justice, and progressive cadres) found it unsettling to give in to those around them from disparate, non-credentialed backgrounds and from younger cohorts, resigned to following the lead from 1960s veterans. The non-authoritarian, elusive essence of Occupy by its nature slipped away from many grasps. Why it stayed mercurial, Schneider reasons, depended on its darting targets.

Whereas the lunch counter sit-ins for Civil Rights aimed "specifically at the laws they oppose," civil disobedience faltered when Big Pharma, banker malfeasance, SuperPACs, bailouts, Citizens United, student debt, foreclosures, drones, McJobs, and income disparity loomed over Americans in the Obama era. The disparate manifestations of these millennial monoliths required different tactics than civil disobedience. Rather than accept political institutions as legitimate, while resisting immoral laws, "political disobedience" (Schneider credits here Bernard Harcourt) brushes aside partisanship, policy reform, or 20th century post-war ideologies. Within this cleared space, Occupy blossomed.

After all, "Occupiers weren't even capable of breaking many of the laws they opposed in the first place." "Diversity of tactics" by autonomous spontaneity meant collaboration in a permissive manner, to evade police crackdowns from its hierarchical command, The NYPD knew by now how to squelch marches. Authority could not control chaos, as the Direct Action "affinity group" exemplified at the Brooklyn Bridge. Non-violent principles sustained Occupiers; pragmatism wedged in its own force.

All the same, Schneider, deep into part two by now of his account, betrays weariness. Mayor Bloomberg tightens the city's grip around Liberty Square. The police dump off homeless people and addicts there, while the unsettled attracted to its safe space increase unease. In this "particular mix of overeducated, underemployed, postindustrial primitivism," Schneider locates the "organic expression of the movement," confounding facile definition. The cause that the encampment represents ties itself to liberating a place, but can that place alone represent the diverse demands of its residents?

Socialists rally for benefits and education; anarchists dismiss government as we know it. Anonymous hovers with its "lulz" sensibility casting its sly wink within the crowds. Online, it and other entities jostle for influence over the movement, trained by the decentralized nature of such fora. Tea Party and right-wing libertarians, who in the nascent stages might have helped broaden the movement through populist appeals, find themselves relegated to leftist caricatures. Journalists and comedians jeer at Occupy. Unions, non-profits, and certain cautious Democrats try to jump on its bandwagon, all with their own calculation.

Free speech contends within what constitutes peaceful assembly: it's the mayor vs. the tent-dwellers. "The call to occupy was meant to be adjudicated not so much by legal right to free speech as by the one inscribed in conscience." Schneider attempts to align this idea with how Occupy undermined law and order as backed by "soldiers posing as police, rigged by and for corporate profits." This observation merited more depth; his analysis wavers in its aim throughout this account. Ultimately, Occupiers waver too. They debate: should they stay or should they go now? 

The very term reminds us of its meaning. "Seizing space and time, and holding them, was how Occupy caused its rupture." It spreads nationwide but in Schneider's sometimes seemingly random "notes," he can evade its force. The day after evictions at Liberty Square, he's off to the Bay Area, but he finds little of lasting substance to comment upon from California for the three-month anniversary of action on November 17th. In the e-galley provided me for review, there is a sudden departure for Greece where Schneider speaks with local and Argentinian activists, who warn of the lure of funds amassed rather than tangible goods to sustain an alternate economy, exchanges of goods and food. Then, anti-eviction sit-ins to take over houses foreclosed draw displaced New York Occupiers to act. Post-evictions, from December into 2012, energy dissipates while Schneider searches in what seems a “lucid dream” for Occupy’s meaning.

It returns via his conversion to Catholicism, documented in his previous book. He praises spiritual activists, who testify to the "higher standard" of "resisting oppression" which transcends civil disobedience and becomes a moral imperative. Trinity Episcopal Church, an historic bastion of the 1%, for all the symbolic vitriol spewed by some Occupiers, stands nonetheless--if in its own fumbled attempts to respond to the movement--for the possibility of assistance to the 99% especially within the underclass. Schneider stays sharp enough to recognize this nuance. He crosses the "line between observer and instigator" with fellow Catholics to respond to his faith's "calling to justice."

In part three, he contrasts 2012. The Obama administration tightened detention of U.S. citizens and upped penalties for protests near Secret Service-protected people or events "of national significance." After a hard winter, the Occupy Wall Street hardcore diminished and toughened. Direct Action advocates contended with the "peace police" of OWS who advised non-violence. Chris Hedges' "The Cancer of Occupy" divides comrades after he denounces Black Bloc tactics others defend. Up against "an essentially paramilitary institution like the NYPD," Schneider tallies the odds for victory at zilch. 

Six months on, Occupy betrays weariness. Stop and Frisk, the DREAM Act, Stand Your Ground incite new marches. Uncertain or committed activists look inward, even as Plus Brigades, The Yes Men, Strike Anywhere, viral videos, cartography, and clowns make their presences felt among the dwindling few. An International Pillow Fight Day attracts more college students than OWS, but the loss of strategic sources of power and location pushes some into a second wind to organize May Day.

Learning of the demise of the New Left after a failed 1971 May Day effort, Schneider fears "we were causing our own undoing." He resigns himself to the reality of organizing after the cameras have left, while the police toughen their stance and the movement diversifies, freeing itself from physical roots.

He finds solace in the culture of photocopied pamphlets and within alliances as venerable as the Catholic Worker Movement as much as Twitter. Yet, OWS signals a shift. Founded not by preachers but by artists (the first glimmer in Adbusters), Schneider defines Occupy's ethos. "Come for the dream, trudge through the reality." Schneider cheers when he sees ecological protests revive, while debt relief jubilee efforts spread and world unrest continues against capitalism.

On May Day 2012, Chris Hedges returns to where it began, near Wall Street. His dour condemnation of violence spurs Schneider to label him as humorless; he does win over the middle-aged or older listeners at Occupy. Younger folks cheer his appointed foil, B. Traven of the anarchist collective CrimethInc: "Just keep with it, basically." Yet, Schneider pegs Traven's pronouncements as preaching to a "self-referential subculture speaking by and for itself." Meanwhile, practically unnoticed by either side, a few still slept in front of Trinity Church.

Another leap, if not a great jump, forward: the first anniversary of Occupy suddenly enters the book. Rosh Hashanah is commemorated while a protester carries a sign against theocracy; a Muslim man unrolls his prayer rug; an Episcopal priest and Catholic nun lead "a solemn march to Zuccotti." Traffic on Broadway halts, Wall Street commuters crowd nearby, police swarm in on the protesters.

As during the previous year and as with such demonstrations, an act of faith endures as testament to Occupy. Whether a revolution will arrive appears as elusive as a Second Coming or a first messiah. Fittingly, Schneider credits the final scene of Fight Club, "with its vision of postyuppie liberation," as playing its part in training those who "birthed Occupy Wall Street" a dozen years later. That is, the finale of crumbling skyscrapers and the prospect of erasure of all financial transactions lingers as appealing and appalling: how is everything "going to be fine"?

After the apocalypse, Schneider feels its grip on him. He concludes with anniversary reflections on the inchoate potential of Occupy, and the practical nature of it, as helping victims of Hurricane Sandy took precedence soon enough. Reacting to such unpredictable forces, no maps or no plans show activists the path forward or a gospel truth. "The beginning is near," as he cites a "popular slogan on Occupy's cardboard signs." (Slightly edited 9-20-13 at New Clear Vision; in shorter form Amazon US 9-15-13.)