The Law of Hospitality

Journal & Essays

Thoughtlessness of the day:

I sat watching the water run into the bathtub, wondering why it was taking so long for the tub to be filled. After a significant amount of time passed, and the water level remained more or less unchanged, I realized I hadn’t stopped up the drain. Smart! As a bonus, I soon apprehended that I hadn’t removed the shower curtain to the outside of the tub, allowing a few particles of grime to make their merry way into the bathwater. Delightful!

Thought of the day:

I often have no conception of what I’m going to write about; I just sit down and wait for words to present themselves. This is partly because I lack the patience to plan and plot and structure a sensible narrative. Sometimes the result is nonsense; on other occasions, the “transcribed” message surprises me. There may be snatches of truth I’ve been trying to find for a long time, or there may be statements that seem to come from nowhere, and which puzzle me (“The sin of modern man is that he forgets how to live in a truly communal way”—who came up with that? surely not my own brain, which rarely, if ever, contemplates such ideas as the sin of modern man). There are times when I feel another voice is expressing itself through me. Does this sound far-fetched and numinous? Perhaps I’d better stop talking then! At any rate, here’s the little essay that presented itself to me today as I sat down and wrote in my bathwater-stained journal. Judge for yourself its truth or foolishness:

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If you ever come across a boy who doesn’t know his way home, tell him that he’s in luck, that he’s found a friend who will show him the route to a welcoming house. This is the law of hospitality. Be as kind to the lost soul, the passing stranger, as you would be to your favorite aunt, or your dearest niece. There is no separation in the heart of a truly enlightened man (or woman) between the extranjero—the unknown one—and the bosom-friend. He who has clear vision can easily see that all neighbors in need of rest are entitled to a warm place to dry their boots and sip a cup of tea. Who knows what miracles of connection might transpire? Everyone has a story to tell—that is evident enough—and if you clear off the table for a guest, and give him enough time to clear his throat and tell his story, the boundaries of your knowledge will grow a little larger, the shoreline of your island will stretch a little farther into the sea.

Now, that doesn’t mean you need to throw all caution to the winds and invite to your fireside every flea and ant you pass on your walk home. There are different ways of being hospitable. The circumstances dictate the expression; not everyone needs to be asked in to tea. Even a smile, if it is the reflexive gesture of a sweet and sincere kindness, can work wonders for a lonely soul. But the law of hospitality never wavers in its insistence that all beings are entitled to a moment of remembrance—a calling to mind of their essential dignity as beings created in love, for love. Forget this, and you have started down the road to chaos and despair.

What is the sin of modern man? It is that he forgets how to live in a truly communal way, regarding each person he encounters as an essential player in the continually evolving story of his life. This is true even in spite of the myriad ways we’ve contrived to keep in touch and stay “connected.” These channels, mainly electronic, are so often filled with noise and weightless niceties that the true capacity for connection—which demands an intense presence of mind, even if momentary—is dimmed or altogether snuffed out.

When you ask the lost boy where he’s trying to get to, remember to take his hand and call him by name. These are the gestures—so simple, the simplest of things—which really strike to the soul and make a person come alive. How could it be otherwise? We were made to be touched and called by name. A baby receives the gifts of touch and name when he is born; these gifts give him an entrance into the world, a way to know others and be known by them. Who is to say that a grown man is any different? His needs have not changed very much; the fundamental things remain. And this is why your heart should be open to the people who come your way: for they’re only seeking the same things you are, and the odds of finding what is sought increase when two people meet and exchange the secrets they’ve acquired in the daily business of getting through life.

Surrender

Journal & Essays

The only thing to do is surrender.

That means letting go and letting God take your life in His hands.

There’s no use in fighting. It’s useless to be at war with yourself and God.

If you want to be a childlike soul, you must decide to set down your worries once and for all. You must truly believe that God is taking care of you all the time.

You are too complicated when you always doubt. It makes you torn up by thoughts of God’s goodness—you don’t think it’s really true that God is good.

If you surrender, you will see your life transformed into something beautiful.

You can’t produce the beauty by trying to control.

The love in your heart will make you shine. It comes through when you stop worrying and let yourself be loved.

Let go by letting your heart go. It just means you need to trust and let your worries slide away.

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The answer’s simple. If it gives you peace, and makes you smile, it comes from God.

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What makes a person pure of heart?

The prophets have said that the pure of heart will see God’s face. If, then, we wish to see God’s face, it would be well to make our own hearts pure.

But how?

The person who is pure of heart truly longs to see God. That is all. Her other desires fall away because her heart is longing for God.

Two-Minute Thoughts

Journal & Essays

On the duty of writers

What is the obligation of the writer to humanity? It perplexes me because some claim that art proper, art in its purest form, exists for its own sake. Which is possibly to suggest that an artist (as a writer can be classified) should be perfectly content if his work remains forever unseen (he is producing art for his own private satisfaction). But this can be a troubling view, for the writer, more than most, has the power to observe the world keenly and make its qualities, good and bad, come startlingly to light. And does there not exist a duty to make people aware? Norman Cousins, for one, says that “There is a need for writers who can restore to writing its powerful tradition of leadership in crisis.”

On talking about mysticism

That the mystic experience is ineffable is a particularly interesting challenge because at the same time so many mystics endeavor to record their experience in words. I was lately writing an essay on The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery Kempe was a mystic whose experience of the divine was rather erratic and given to extreme emotional outburst. Her book is considered the first autobiography in English. She feels a duty to transcribe her experience, and perhaps there is some catharsis in it, but she never describes things quite as she wishes: she overproduces words or underproduces them, and often, she can find no other expression for her love than to cry and “roar.” To render the divine using human faculties is fraught with insufficiency; words are a necessary medium, but they are limited. Scholarship of mysticism must be especially difficult, because the scholastic’s primary form of discourse is the book, and we might say that the mystic scholar must struggle with writing about the unwriteable. And now I am writing about the writing of the unwriteable – what meta-analysis!

On feelings of sadness during penance

It is easy to romanticize melancholy feelings and decide that they are somehow holier or more pious than feelings of joy or indifference (presumably because they involve suffering, a carrying of the cross). Yet it is erroneous to think this way. To be “swallowed up with overmuch sorrow” leads more surely to harm than to purification or mortification, for despair is the ultimate end, and in despair, there is little place for faith and hope and the clear-mindedness to enact charity, or the divine sort of love. To experience sadness in moderation allows feelings of compassion to deepen while keeping an essentially hopeful worldview intact. Penance may involve regret and loathing for sins, but it must always have an element of hope in mind: the chance for absolution and thereafter the chance to live with integrity.

Don’t Analyze Literature from the Psychiatrist’s Chair

Scholarly

Prompt: “The critic’s task is analogous to the psychiatrist’s. Agree or disagree?”

Salvador DalĂ­ said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” Now we are being asked to make a distinction very like this one: Are the artist and his work of art a species of madness, and ought we to diagnose them as such? Read More“Don’t Analyze Literature from the Psychiatrist’s Chair”

Gender Differences in Religiosity: Why Are Males Less Religious?

Scholarly

A literature review I wrote a few years ago for a class called “Boys’ Psychosocial Development,” taught by Professor Judy Chu.

Women are more religious than men. The phenomenon is so universally acknowledged that it has become an assumption in many sociological studies. It is not, however, the assumption itself that complicates current research, but rather the mechanism that underlies it. What accounts for gender differences in religious attitudes and behaviors? What makes men less religious than women? Several theories have tried to offer a cohesive explanation. By way of analysis, I will look at four of the most influential theories – including gender role socialization, structural location, gender orientation, and risk aversion – in order of their entrée into the academic literature. These theories alternately prioritize social, contextual, personal, and biological processes as a means of interpreting the gender-religion link. After considering the advantages and limitations of each, I will concede that no theory has proven robust enough to give a comprehensive view. Understanding the origin of gender differences in religion thus remains a difficult problem. But it is also a crucial one, with implications for the broader context of male development. Religiosity – which I will define here as how religious a person is, with respect to activity and belief – can be negatively correlated with criminality and violence and positively tied to health and healing. More generally, religion is one of the major resources used to generate meaning in life, explaining the world through positive beliefs, rituals, symbols, traditions, and support (Fletcher, 2004). Therefore understanding why men are less religious may produce insights in service of a larger goal, namely, helping men to lead full and healthy lives.

Read More“Gender Differences in Religiosity: Why Are Males Less Religious?”

The “Voice Loss” of Gifted Girls

Scholarly

Carol Gilligan famously noticed the lack of females in psychological research and her work exploits this absence. She introduces the concept of voice, which has both literal and metaphoric definitions, and traces its loss and rediscovery among girls and women. In “The Centrality of Relationship in Human Development” (1996), she engages with the phenomenon of a vulnerable critical period, which finds girls vibrant and healthy in early childhood, and then suddenly much more susceptible to psychological pressures (like depression and self-doubt) with the start of adolescence. Boys, meanwhile, become vulnerable at a younger age. Gilligan points out the consequences of a critical period that coincides with the dawn of adolescence: abstract thinking has begun to develop and leaves girls with a resulting double awareness. They sense, first, an inner world of personal thoughts and feelings and, second, an outer world of cultural and social expectations. Balancing these dual realities puts a special cognitive strain on girls and often leads to confusion and disassociation. I would like to expand Gilligan’s notion of the dual-world problem, likening it to a particularly dangerous kind of cognitive dissonance that complicates the larger picture of gender imbalance.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Girls in American culture encounter this challenge as they try to reconcile their inner and outer selves, but in an alarming number of cases, they cease to function in any healthy way. Unfortunately, they construe this failure as indeed a sign of a second-rate intelligence, calling themselves “stupid” and undercutting their knowledge with phrases like “I don’t know.” But, as Gilligan points out, it is precisely the brightest and most gifted girls who suffer the severest effects of dissonance; and thus it is the smartest girls who are most likely to doubt their smartness. Why are gifted girls particularly vulnerable to adolescent “voice loss”? Gilligan does not explain, so I am left to guess at the reasons. It may be that gifted girls have more refined powers of abstraction and are thus more sensitive to the disparity between their outer and inner worlds. As the disparity increases, so does the cognitive burden, since contradictions become bigger and harder to contain inside a single mental framework. It could also be that gifted populations are more perfectionistic, and pressures to succeed are amplified. Or perhaps the answer is a simple matter of salience. Girls who perform extremely well and then flounder show a more obvious decline in function than girls who initially perform at a mediocre level, since the distance from high to low exceeds the distance from middle to low. Whatever the reason, the silencing of gifted girls constitutes an important loss. Gifted girls, after all, have the potential to think up some of the most creative solutions to the challenge of gender inequality.

But if the repressed voices of gifted girls contribute to harmful gender patterns, so does the very nature of cognitive dissonance. Psychology tells us that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing how they feel about the conflicting pressures. So girls who juggle a bright and opinionated mind with a desire to appear sweet and docile may respond by refuting their intelligence. This adjustment may reduce individual dissonance, but it simultaneously reinforces patriarchal axioms that define females as submissive. These axioms, in turn, affect another generation of girls and ignite another round of dissonant pressures. It is a hard-to-break loop, and it is especially problematic when we recall that girls, unlike boys, have already learned to reason abstractly when they reach their vulnerable period. This ability to deal in formal (rather than concrete) operations equips girls with an especially acute awareness of identity struggles. Females, then, have an insight into the gender imbalance that may remain largely unavailable to males. Contributing their voices becomes increasingly important, and failing to communicate becomes increasingly devastating. It would be helpful to look to subcultures that show surprisingly high resilience during the adolescent years to see what, exactly, it is that allows them to keep their voices clear and strong.

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