• Tag Archives Camus

  • Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    More butting my head against a language that any 4 year old in ancient Rome could speak and a reasonably intelligent 5 year old could read.  I guess there is a plateau affect here and I’m standing on one right now.  I can see the path I’ve taken to get here, off to my back, but the road ahead lies blocked, beginning at a point somewhere above me, as if I stand before a cliff.

    Not complaining, just observing.  I’m here by choice and I know that.

    Groveland asked me for a sermon topic, something I’m going to preach on October 9th, exactly a week before our cruise.  A month and a half is a long lead time, so I went back through this blog, hunting for a topic that interested me and one that might interest Grovelanders, too.

    Here’s what I sent them:

    Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

    What resources do we have, those of us no longer in the Christian faith?  Or those of us never in it?  What resources do we have to replenish the spirit and feed the Self?

    The Western cultural tradition, a great river of classical literature and fine arts has enough nourishment for several lifetimes.  We’ll explore works like the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Inferno and how to use them for our personal growth.

    I lifted the phrase the great river of the classics from one of my favorite authors, Camille Paglia.  Other eras have used the writings of the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans and the Italians in particular as stimulus for reflection, contemplation, meditation.  I’ll toss in a few later writers like Kafka, Camus, Goethe, Hesse, Tolstoy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, probably Rainer Rilke and Wallace Stevens, too.

    Might toss in a few works of art, perhaps Goya, the color field painters, Song dynasty potters and painters, perhaps a Tibetan Buddhist thangka.

    I suppose I’ll have to start by considering the nature of resources for spirituality, something I’ve come of late to define as enrichment, expansion, deepening of the Self.  But count on a Latin phrase or two, just because I can.

     


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  • A Thought on Extinction

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring     Waning Moon of Winds

    Quick notes for some future thought.  Often I carry a notion around for days before I set it down and I’ve had one banging around for a week or so.  On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.  The more I’ve thought of that poem and the sinking in to the sands of time of 99.99999% of us, often not even name remaining for long, I’ve felt strangely liberated by it.

    Let me extend  the notion.  Not only will even the best and the brightest of us fade from view, as have all but a very few, but given time even the starship on which we travel will die away, too.  Long before that humanity will have ended its time here on earth, perhaps we will go out to the stars, perhaps not, but at some point the planet we know, that humanity has known as its only home, will disappear from the universe, swallowed by an expanding red giant.

    This cheery line of thought led me backwards then to our self-awareness.  We know we will die.  This is said to be the ur-fear, but I think is not.  The ur-fear is not death per se, but the question of extinction.  Somehow extinction makes us uneasy, as if we should be an exception to what we expect for dogs, cows, trees and frogs.  This winking out of aware life carries a potential and, I think, actual message of nihilism.  That is, life has no overriding moral purpose when seen in light of death.

    Does this mean no ethical system has roots, punch.  No, of course not.  Camus felt that death made us all brothers and sisters, committed to each other and to as smooth and happy a course of life for the other as for ourselves.  Ethical systems validated only by post death rewards or punishments do fall by the side.  But they are no great loss.


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