Between Self and Soul: A Voyage

By Barbara Groark (a poem from some time in the 1980s)

The Dream:

Through the pipe in his teeth, jaw thrust forward
Stubbs says, "We're going after Moby Dick."

I cling flat with both hands to the surfaced submarine,
black and adamantine,
through rough night seas. Waves break over,
but I stay. Behind me an old man in a white
suit and string tie with a little girl by the hand
walks on sea legs toward me through the wind.
I worry for their safety. The wind whips them over-
board. I say, "That doesn't happen."

I awake.

The Waking:
Several years later: Thar she blows. It's Moby Dick,
destroyer of men and boys.
All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
Thar she blows.

The captain's log,

But I am only the lookout.

Ahab is destroyed I hope. Who needs a mad captain?

Should women be in the navy and sail the seven seas?

Some may need to do hard things
their mothers didn't do for lack of knowledge
or courage or wherewithal or need.

Not every man would sail the seas.
Not every woman either. On the water, rocking
steady, boards creaking, the harpooneers watch the
water, the rowers wait, sometimes an hour. Sometimes
he gets away. All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
The captain now is Christ.

No danger of suicide
if we follow our leader.

No danger of suicide.
Moby Dick hates girls and grandfathers.
The girl is six or eight, the grandfather like Santa,
old enough to wobble, moves slowly enough
for a child’s pace. They are safe now behind a rail.
But the rest of us are with the boats and have the whale.
He's slippery and he is cruel.

A diabolic nature,

not human. His animal eyes look at you dully.

I'd been riding him, the whale, for several years.
Ahab beckoned from his back, a dead man beckoning.
I've been dead for several years now at the bottom of the sea.
I'm strange-looking, like those fish that never see the light.
There's no negotiating with him.

Safe, if you follow the leader.

There's no negotiating,
no reason in him.

Yet he has innocent prisoners.

Will they wash up whole on the shore, shaken but alive?
Will they scar like Ahab, marred, bitter, dangerous?
Will they be destroyed before we reach them?

Maybe we can only ease their deaths.
Our father will heal them. They will die to this world
and be with us in the next.

For some the next is now.

Unreason to combat unreason.
Unreason greater than their unreason.
Patience greater than their patience.
Strength greater than their seeming strength.

Patient as hell. Love with no room for fear.

That is what they most fear,
as you've noticed. It puzzles them, your confidence.

Something About Religion - Part 1

By Barbara Groark

I finally broke down and ordered – and yesterday received from Amazon – Eric Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth, and registered for Oprah’s Book Club. I’m on page 56 of The Power of Now (I have some catching up to do with the Book Club – they’re all on A New Earth already), and I feel that I should expect great breakthroughs before I’m done. What will they be?

Mr. Tolle is a 'spiritual teacher' who left Roman Catholicism as a young man, but reconciled with Jesus through the Buddha, like some of my own relatives. He’s a bit abstract – I find myself longing for some metaphors while reading.

While watching one related online discussion, I confess I was reminded of Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter books – the teacher of the Divination classes who wore big round, thick glasses that made her eyes very big and who always seemed about ready to float into space. Something like Sister Rita Carmel in our old Religion class. She had the same general aura as Professor Trelawney but with a more organized and intellectual component, which brings out the worst in teenagers. Do you remember her nickname, Sister Rita Rotten-Tooth? That was pretty cold, but that era did not have the vast dental advantages we have today, such as teeth-whitening strips, which I am beginning to need.

By the way, Religion class is now called Theology class.

I remember one time asking Sister how you could sin by the sense of smell (every sense has its importance as a data-collector and its problem areas). Every kid becomes a lawyer at some point (right, parents?) looking for loopholes in the arguments of the authorities. I thought my question would stump her, since I was stumped, but she was ready with an answer, something about memory and occasions of sin. Guess I was too young to understand that.

Sophomore year we had a priest for Religion class – someone help me on this one; name began with an ‘N’ and his hair was in a pompadour like Elvis and he was sort of short with stocky build; his picture is not in our senior year yearbook with the other faculty. He apparently did not stay through our senior year.

Anyway, I for some reason remember asking him the following: premise: Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. So if life is discovered on other planets, did Jesus die for people on other planets as well? Would he have to descend to those other planets and suffer and die again? Or did his experience on earth cover everyone and everything in the universe?

I think I got a moment of silence, an exasperated look, and maybe something about the Once And For All idea to shut me up. I would say I was half-humorous and half-serious in my question. I was just extending the argument given. Because I’m brilliant!

Have you read the Christopher Hitchens book, God Is Not Great? He’s the British-American professor who is standing up for the Atheist Movement in America and has declared a War on Religion. It’s like a trip back to high school. I got through half before I realized, as the Pope might say “There was nothing new here.” He’s just a little materialist, a Marxist, and that’s the extent of his argument, though he is somewhat entertaining with his glass of wine on YouTube. He even commiserates in his book about having to grieve over the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall as a low moment for atheists everywhere, so he perfectly understands believers’ grief over the embarrassments in religious groups in the last 15 years. What could be worse than embarrassment?

The introduction to his book mentions his first atheist idea: when he was 12 or 13, a very nice teacher (he grew up Church of England) presented the argument from nature for the existence of God, and there having to be therefore an original Maker of all that you see. Hitchens was not convinced, and considered all religion as essentially lame from that time on.

I remember hearing that same argument of Thomas Aquinas in eighth grade and thinking “That does not really convince me of the existence of God.” But that fact did not remove my belief at the time, though I was never overly devotional. I guess in the back of my mind there was the thought that I was only in eighth grade and was on schedule to find out more as time went by.

Not that it’s all been an unbroken line of belief since then. I drifted away from Church at college age, mostly just to see whether lightning would strike me dead, and it didn’t, so being naturally lazy I kept drifting without issuing any press releases about my newer belief system, since I didn’t have any. But after a while, I would come to some decision, mostly about what looked just too stupid, something that maybe was a trend at the time, and began to come up with my own little policies. After a while I realized that I was coming up with the same policies as the Church recommends, and since they already had done all that work over the centuries, why start my own personal religion? Why not rejoin? So I eventually – some people are flabbergasted – returned in 10 years’ time, and gradually got more compliant to the rules again, though I’m still not overly devotional. I consider the Church a bunch of fellow adults, colleagues on the same team. And they are pretty smart – they agree with me on so much. And now that I’m older I’m better at speaking up to, say, my brother-in-law Fang. Mr. Hitchens is just another brother-in-law to me.

Catholics have historically been good at allowing irreverence at times, but not outright disrespect. It’s what’s underneath that counts, as humorists should know. Right, Bill Maher?

OK, I’m trying to stay coherent in this blog, but that’s difficult with this subject. I’m trying to get back to Mr. Tolle, who seems like a nice guy, but I think I’m going to move to Mary Karr. She is a current poet and professor at a Midwestern university who wrote The Liar’s Club and other memoirs about her dysfunctional childhood. She is a recovering drug addict, and she converted as an adult to Catholicism, and is sort of a different type of theologian. She wrote an outstanding article in Poetry magazine over a year ago, and I’ve been a fan ever since.

See links to two articles below. Getting through these may take some determination, and I’ve given approximate reading times in case you have to put them off. Professor Karr kids about having no excuse for becoming Catholic, not having been a ‘cradle Catholic.’ I have even less of an excuse, since I left but then came back.

This is a shorter interview with Mary Karr from March 2006 [reading time about 5 min]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/03/27/findrelig.DTL

This is the major article by Karr from Poetry Magazine of November 2005 (reading time about 30 min)
http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=175809