Always the mind
walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall...
I'm struck by that phrase "Always the mind" and how Levertov sets that line off by itself to draw our close attention.
In the next post we'll get to "the wall" in the mind, but I want to pause here to simply note how the spiritual quest is characterized in the poem as mental wandering. Recall the lines we discussed in the last post:
Walking
the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,
thoroughfares, wide boulevards...
The vision here is how religious experience has become excessively, even morbidly, introspective and ruminative. We look for God in the mind, wandering mental alleys, thoroughfares, and boulevards. Always the mind, walking and wandering. This ruminative, self-referential experience, and documenting its mental health consequences, is the focus of Part 1 of The Shape of Joy.
During my long season of doubt and deconstruction this was my own experience. Always in my mind. My spiritual searching wasn't much of a searching as it was extremely self-referential. Looking for God in my head. Charles Taylor describes the modern self as "buffered," as walled off from the world and closed in upon itself. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, we've become locked inside our own heads. Imprisoned within ourselves. Just about every person I've counseled in a season of doubt and deconstruction is characterized by this sort of excessive introspection and morbid rumination, chasing thoughts in their own heads. God is a Rubik's Cube they are trying to solve. Atonement. The problem of evil. Life after death. Evolution. Question after question. Puzzle after puzzle. Book after book. Podcast after podcast. Coffee chat after coffee chat. On and on and on and on it goes, always the mind, wandering its corridors.
And yet, as described in the last post this experience is cross-pressured. Our morbid introspection becomes interrupted. An encounter with beauty, for example, throws us out of ourselves. We stop thinking "to kneel in awe of beauty." As I describe in both The Shape of Joy and Hunting Magic Eels, borrowing from Hartmut Rosa, in these moments life becomes resonant again, suffused with significance. Introspection gives way to sacred encounter.
Fundamentally, that is the critical insight of both The Shape of Joy and Hunting Magic Eels, the two books complementing each other: A meaningful, joyful, and resonant experience of life involves getting out of your head to restore a proper experiential relation to the world outside of your head.
