On Motivation.

People come into the Carmelite Library to read: journals, study notes, books whose page numbers are carefully recorded from one visit to the next. What motivates them? What is motivation, which must have something to do with movement? Is it an external force — to get out of the wind and rain — or an internal compulsion, like the body’s need to sit down for awhile?

            How much motivation is physical, how much mental? Our thoughts swim in a chemical bath: so do our feelings. When we say we’re not motivated, do these chemicals wash about due to the presence of light, darkness, or wild weather? My dogs aren’t motivated to lift one paw on a cold wet morning.

            Lack of motivation can be fuelled by expectation. Not only today, but in our life frame, we want to fill out the picture and achieve something splendid. But somehow the motivation isn’t there: the getting moving. If you can’t equal or surpass your heroes — or even the child next door — you lose hope. Our culture that demands so much may often give back little. What motivates someone to keep practicing the piccolo for hours every day? Maybe he likes the sound.

            Motivation comes easier when the aim is clear and the reward constant. I’m motivated to go to work to pay my bills, for example. I seem to be less motivated to exercise to improve my health. Is the goal too diffuse, or the reward uncertain? Maybe both, in my case.

            What if we were motivated to do exactly what we want? Seriously. You think you should be motivated to clean the floor, but the idea dismays you so much you want to sit down and cry. So cry. You should be motivated to cook dinner, but you want to relax and watch a film instead. So eat another breakfast today. You’d like to be motivated to practice the piccolo, but you need more sleep than you ever get. So sleep. The piccolo isn’t going anywhere.

            Some things are nearly always motivating. You can do them sitting in an armchair. Look around: you’ll be motivated to praise God. Think about the state of the world: you’ll want to ask for blessings on everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know, too. Prepare yourself to stand witness to the truth, in whatever form that may take on the day that you get moving.

            When the reader left the library, she spoke to me. She said: “It’s a peaceful place to be.”

On transitions: Bishop John McIntyre.

This past long weekend I spent some time travelling through a seasonal rainstorm to see the house of a young person who had just bought their first home. As I crossed the threshold I recalled the first homes of others I had known, for this had much in common with them. An affordable first home is often full of ladders, paint tins, no-more-gaps, carpets in need of replacement and kitchens on the list for determined renovation. It’s a home in process.

            I thought of Janus, Roman god of gates and doorways, who ruled all thresholds including the gate to the gods: prayers to other gods had to go through him, with his double faces, one looking at the past, the other towards the future. And so it is with transitions, directed by our pasts, leading to our futures.

            Big transitions like weddings and graduations may be ceremonies attended by many people, while others may be whisper soft with an audience of one. Some can be planned for; others simply appear, perhaps as a stumbling-block in our way. Not so long ago I passed over the threshold from unthinking health to carefully managed illness, where I was the main witness. Some transitions cross the threshold to the future, like the first day on your first job; others draw heavily on the past, like clearing up the effects of the dead.

            Conversion is of course a transition, from one belief to another, or from no belief to finally getting around to thinking about our relationship to the Divine. Is loss of faith a transition? I’m inclined to think it is not. Maybe if you’ve had a faith to lose, you simply can’t get along with your current Divine-human situation, and have lost energy or intellect for the present. It does take both energy and intellect to hold onto faith, and some people at some times have other things to do.

            While we’re here, I don’t think that when one door closes, another opens. Rather, we pass under the archway from one room or state of being into another, not exclusive of the past but informed by it in memory and reality. In the same way, the future can intrude into the present sometimes in prescient, even unnerving ways.No shut doors: nothing solid in between.

            The great transitions are those Buddha noted as bringing suffering: birth and death. Birth, despite its thrilling manifestations of love and attachment, always leads eventually to death. I think of great spiritual masters who have been taken by death, and of martyrs, whose ends tend to be messily cruel. Of the many family and friends who have gone over the threshold into death, which is thought of as the last transition, the final transformation.

            The ancients thought of the cemetery as a dormitory, where the dead await the transition to life eternal, when the universe attains its end, and all things return to God. This week we lost, suddenly, a valued leader, pastor, and mentor in Bishop John McIntyre. He has gone into the changeless realm, and is free of the constant transitions of our mortal life. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

           

On Vocation

The first question in the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer is this: What is your Name? This name that our parents call us is our first vocation, a vocation to human life. Indeed much of our subsequent vocation may be determined right here: by genetics, by upbringing, and by example. Very commonly, one’s working life was decided by the family trade or business: James and John fishing with their father are recapitulated through the ages in all kinds of situations.

            There have also been many who broke out to follow the inspirations of the day: from Crusaders seeking adventure on the way to the Holy Land to miners from all over the world piling into California (the Chinese called it the Gold Mountain) and Australia (the New Gold Mountain). The city of Melbourne that I photograph was built on the wealth of the Gold Rush by some who felt they had a vocation to get rich.

            In the Bible, a certain group of individuals meet with a vocation they would rather do without: these are the prophets. They don’t welcome the call to go tell the king what the Lord thinks of him; they realise the king is in denial and likely to punish the messenger. Prophets may take quite a few calls before they do what they’re told: Jonah would rather be eaten by a sea monster.

            So vocation isn’t always a comfortable or joyful experience.

            A vocation is different from a gift. Composer Benjamin Britten ‘loved numbers’ and his gift was such that his school wanted to send him to Cambridge as a mathematician, while his father hoped he’d become a nice accountant. But Britten knew his vocation was to write music, and he used his gift for numbers to fill his works, like J. S. Bach before him, with mathematical delights and puzzles, including the famous’ turning of the screw’ through the musical keys in the opera of the same name.

            Still many persons, including myself, have times of dismay when we feel we have no real vocation of our own. This affects us, whatever our gifts. But today’s values around performance and work don’t apply in all times and places. Mozart’s sister Anna Maria was more respected for marrying into the aristocracy than for being one of the great keyboard virtuosos of the age, and Sofonisba Anguissola, 16^th century court painter to the Queen of Spain, had a noble father who trained his daughters as painters to elevate the status of the art because these noblewomen excelled in it.

            There’s also a difference between vocation and something you just want to do.

Many things bring interest and happiness, and these are often driven by love. Love predicates attachment: it may be familial, filial, romantic, idealistic, altruistic, aesthetic, and more. To have something you love to do is both a gift and an achievement. It’s often separate from the destiny of humankind, which is both to make a living and to nurture the living, and it’s also often separate from vocation.

            We belong to God, and this is the basis of our vocation. The first letter of John states that the sensual understanding of the word of life (understood through all the senses) is the fulfilment of joy: that God is light, and not darkness. This is not understood through work or performance, but through fellowship with others.

            Evagrius of Pontus advised monks discouraged with daily work to seek the desert: the desert cell with its attendant poverty and solitude was the way to clarify this discontent. Even in the desert, though, we will discover than vocation is different from salvation. ‘What must I do to be saved?’ asked the rich man. Sell up, give it all away, and follow me, said Jesus. ‘Work out your salvation with diligence,’ said Buddha. The important thing to realise is that vocation is not the real question. If God has something to say to you, you will know it. Let’s hope it doesn’t involve being swallowed by a sea monster.

On Taking All of Me

A child across the street is playing with a ball. I hear him practicing with his football as I sit practicing with my piano. He does seem to get more joy of it, too. It’s uneven, not regimented, taking its path with the path of the ball, that falls where it will. And he can play like this for hours.

            The piano teacher makes the remark: “You have the knowledge to play this piece, but you don’t yet have the skill.” The word skill, which once meant ‘understanding’, comes from an Anglo-Saxon past where the meaning was ‘distinction’. And ‘distinction’ refers in its turn to discrimination or distinguishment between things that are separate, or distinct. Hence, understanding. Yet now it preferences its secondary meaning of superiority, or particular favour. The idea is that skill, dexterity, mastery, is specially favoured and distinct.

            ‘Dexterity’ contains a fluency, or flowingness: the grace with which right-handed people use the right hand, while their left acts comparatively awkwardly. In the not distant past, right-handedness was considered natural, so the idea of a dexterous left hand took time to assimilate. Alas for me, playing the piano requires the dexterous use of both hands.

            It’s said that mastery of any skill takes at least 10,000 hours of practice. I’ve tried to become skilful at many things in my days, and at 10,000 hours each I get the feeling that each of them wants to take all of me. Of course there’s not enough of me to go around. The main difficulty is time for practice.

            There are many kinds of skills: physical skills, like riding a bicycle, relying on balance and muscle memory below the level of consciousness; mental skills like arithmetic and spelling that call upon and interpret symbols. And there may be spiritual skills, like the ‘skilful means’ of the Buddhists who practice the noble eight-fold path. Anger, for example, is generally one of the less skilful ways of dealing with other people.

            Paul invited the Galatians to ‘live by the Spirit.’ This would produce the ‘fruits’ of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And he particularly warned them against being ‘desirous of vain glory’ (St. Ignatius Loyola agreed with him, thinking this was Satan’s portal), or competitive, or envious. If we take a look at our own culture, and people we see in public life, aren’t these the distinguishing features of society: competition, envy, lust for fame?

            We have plenty of time to put in the 10,000 hours of practice on patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control and all the others. We don’t need a bicycle or a piano or even a football to practice. You can do it all day, even on public transport, even on the road. Living in the spirit results in the fruits, but it also is the fruits. And you can play with it, like the child with the ball, following the Way, that falls where it will.

On Hands and Voices

I’ve been reading the biography of Sabine Baring-Gould, author, in his own day, of many best-selling novels, but now remembered for a number of hymns that are still sung. A man slated by his father to become an engineer, who counted on his fingers, alas, to the end of his days, he went to Cambridge as a classicist and fell in love with the Oxford Movement, only being allowed to take Holy Orders after his two younger brothers declined their father’s invitation to take the younger son’s place in the Church.

            Baring-Gould spent the last forty-five years of his long life, according to his biographer, doing nothing but exactly what he wished to do. His living of Lew Trenchard, where he was the loved and honoured Rector, was also his manor, where he was the respected squire. He had fifteen children, some of whom he didn’t recognise when he met them. He wrote standing at a writing-desk all day: novels, histories, lives of the saints, theology, church history, poetry, antiquities, translations. His lovely translation of the fifteenth-century hymn “Come down, O love divine” remains in the hymnal, while “Onward Christian Soldiers” has fallen out of favour, perhaps partly due to Sullivan’s stirring (imperialist?) tune: Baring-Gould wrote it for Sunday-school children to sing, and set it to a slow movement from Haydn. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was controversial in its time: the line, “With the cross of Jesus going on before” was considered too papist for some, especially since the hymn was written for the children’s procession.

            He set his hand to many things. He was an amateur archaeologist — especially of his local district — when amateurs were held in high regard. He considered his most important work the collection of English folk-songs; he compiled an immense volume of the old song-men’s repertoire, rushing to the side of these aged singers to catch the works before they died. His biographer believes he could have achieved more lasting work had he restricted his interests: he might have made his mark in literature, theology or history. But he set his hand to many things.

            This is Baring-Gould’s story. Story, of course, comes from the voice and makes meaning of events as we tell them to ourselves, whether past or future events.Thus a baby may be predicted as “Daddy’s little princess” or a father remembered in “Dad’s mission was to take care of his family — and he did!” Stories we tell in preparation, celebration, commemoration.

            The work of hands is somewhat different. Hands make the present, repair the past, structure the future. The presentness of hands is made present to me whenever I play a wrong note on the piano: everyone can tell what I’m thinking! (or not thinking, as is often the case). Keeping the eyes on the keyboard to assure a fingering or a rhythm I can see time: past time flowing into present into future. Is it better to set our hands to many things, or to attain the starry skies by handing on only one thing?

            One thing only is necessary, according to the Gospels, and maybe Baring-Gould did just as well setting his hands to many things, and doing exactly what he wished to do, in the context of a verse he wrote that was left out of Hymns Ancient and Modern:

            ‘What the Saints established

            That I hold for true,

            What the Saints believeth

            That believe I too.’

Too papist? Or maybe not.

           

Graduation Day: On Cleansing the Thoughts of the Heart

I have just completed a course of New Testament studies that has taken me five years in its latest incarnation. During this time, interrupted by illnesses and events having as much to do with spirit as text, I have finished a master’s degree and passed a test of my character. Or so I think.

            I learned a great deal about the values and ideas of classical antiquity, for the sacred scriptures are thousands of years old. And I was made to question my own values. Things like honesty, loyalty, humility and perseverance proved important.

            Today we know that the heart is a pump, moving blood around the body, and so mechanical. It symbolises feeling or emotion, from hot-blooded passion to icy broken-heartedness. Blood, naturally, both symbolises and is life, and when the heart ceases to beat we die.

            But for the ancients, the heart symbolised mind, or thought, from the wicked mind of violence to the righteous thoughts of the blessed. The heart is a storehouse of memory; thinking happens in the heart, unless the heart is so hardened that a person’s judgement and personal relationships are closed off, for the kind of thinking done in the heart isn’t separate from feeling. Indeed, the thoughts of the heart must be informed by feeling, most especially the feeling of reverence towards God.

            Why undertake a course of study? To get a job, a ticket to work? If the subject has no likelihood of future prospects, how then are you spending your time? I came to the conclusion that cleansing the thoughts of the heart had something to do with it.

            The heart, in this ancient sense, can become fouled like the bottom of a boat covered in barnacles and seaweed. Our judgement can be clouded by regrets, uncompleted actions, wrong turnings, bad decisions, and even worse, the arrogance of an unrealistic sense of responsibility as if every matter in the universe needs to be referred to us for improvement. And a heart that thinks no wrong of itself is obviously out of touch with real life.

            Study forces you to clear out some debris. You have to refine ideas, to separate the strands and make choices. You may learn both how much you can do, and how little you can get by on. You may find friends in unexpected places, recover from betrayals, be given second chances, get up to fight another day. You can gather grains of wisdom.

            Cleansing the heart is a spiritual effort, informed by the spirit, leading to right reverence and clear thinking. Study, then, isn’t a matter for the intellect alone. Indeed, without love, we may say that study is empty, void at the heart. And love is never lost.

            I think we must inform the mind, or heart, as to our best love, to love what is worthy,

lovely, and sacred, apart from mere advantage and overcoming others. Look around the world, and away from yourself: imagine in your heart, how much there is to love.

           

On Orphaned Objects

In my work at the Carmelite Library I have a great deal to do with books that have lost their homes. Change through time causes convents, monasteries, even parishes to close, move, or downsize, resulting in boxes and boxes of drifting books. It’s a worthy effort, saving the libraries of the monastic houses. We rescue books and take them on board.

            Other books belong to the class of orphaned objects, whose owners have died or departed. Some astonishing collections appear: all the Icelandic sagas in the original, for instance. Some rare and precious volumes surface. Sometimes these have been rescued at the last minute from the tip; sometimes they’ve been donated by concerned heirs with no space to keep them.

            Orphaned objects confront everyone who has to clean up a deceased estate, or deal with the effects of a relation retired to a nursing home. They may be sentimental or family treasures, pure trash, valuable works of art, tools and dishes, clothing from bridal gowns (I had to find a home for my grandmother’s) to running shoes. The possessions of artists, writers and musicians hold works and manuscripts that might be welcomed in galleries or university archives, but could also be just as unsaleable as they were in their creator’s life. What to do then?

            Tragic things happen to orphaned objects. Oscar Wilde’s books were instantly auctioned as he was sent to prison, a beautiful collection of the most lovely and fabulous examples of bibliographic art, damaged or destroyed in the hasty selling, split up and sent all over the world. Someone loved and treasured many of the things whose aura vanished with the person.

            Living orphans include animals and plants. I think of a plant breeder whose vast number of unique specimens died as the heirs dealt first with his illness and death, then with grief and many other complications: the plants couldn’t survive the neglect. Orphaned animals need homes with great urgency. As I write this, sitting on my back veranda, an elderly dog lies beside me: he was orphaned when his owner had a stroke and then died, so fortunately her daughter found safe homes for her dogs.

            All things are mutable. But not all things are ever new. It’s best to keep what you love, and let go of as much attachment as you can. Sometimes new attractions can be provoked as the object passes to a recipient who recognises its specialness. It’s not always better to give than to receive. Receiving an orphaned object can be a blessing.

            It’s said that everything is a loan from God, and can be requested again at any time. Abandoning it all to trust may be the only answer. Orphaned objects have to find their own way in the world, and we can but hope that we will find, and be, good guides.