HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Jan. 5, 2006 Often I visit the local homeless shelter. Usually the chronic despair is not audible. Today a man was weeping and another man was comforting him. I had to pass by quickly because of my self-imposed schedule. I had been thinking about a Christmas article titled "Being Kind" by a prominent journalist and counselor. She wanted people to smile back at her when she smiled at them, and she was irritated when someone didn't smile back at her. I wonder what she would have written about this weeping man at the homeless shelter. I wonder what this counselor would have felt had she met Jesus and Jesus didn't reciprocate for her. Myth or not, fake or real, Jesus was a cartoon character depicted by modern Mass Media. If we can contemplate Popeye, and Mickey Mouse, then we can contemplate Jesus. If not God, well, at least human imagination produces Him. Where is there a picture of a broadly smiling Christ? And was not Christ the very Sacred Heart of compassion? As a sensitive poet I wrote in 1963, "What I see bothers me into words." Forty-two years later, I am the same person. A lot goes on these days that stirs the compassionate heart. Rather than weep, I write. Adi Da referred to it "the knee of listening." I called it "raindrops." For hours I used to sit and let them fall in torrents upon the page. Back in those innocent days, I was a flaming heart. Strong emotion drives a man to incoherence, and when he feels overwhelmed he weeps or he laughs his head off like the mythical laughing Buddha. Whether one is super-sad or super-happy, tears flow freely. The poet translates these expressions into words. One may call it surreal or dada. Artists, too, express grandiose emotions in art that is not representational. When the grandiosity grows immensely, the artist identifies with the mythic God or Christ. The incoherence is identified as madness. One's heart responds to a frightened and incoherent homeless man who has no hope and no faith, so he desperately needs the shelter of a church or a church-sponsored organization like the local homeless shelter. There might be other charities, but the person who takes a day off and comforts a weeping man is far greater than I, a mere poet who passes by and trembles for an hour afterward. The words tumble out, and they express reality. So now both you and I are in contact with reality. The mythic Christ passes by and stops. The schedule that he has imposed on himself, or the duty that society has imposed on Him is broken. The mythic Christ is free to comfort the one who is in need. This is the difference between the mythic Christ or Saint Nicholas or Saint Francis of Vincent Van Gogh all who lived for a time in imitation of Christ. The poet passes by and is bothered but the poet is not the mythic Christ. The best the poet can do is help you understand the flaming heart of Vincent the painter and other souls who live in a continual trembling. We can't realistically expect their words to be coherent and we can't realistically expect their paintings to look like a Hals or a Rembrandt. Such men are technical masters, not saints or near saints. Compassion comes without training and hits a young man like a thunderbolt. Conventional thinking is disintegrated as were Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the atomic fire. No compassion delivered those bombs, and no compassion protect a sensitive person from reality. Consequently a certain number of young men and women these days go to school and learn all the rules but eventually reality hits them and they become incoherent. Society as it is can't repair the damage because society is at fault in the first place to set people up for failure. I walk the streets and see and hear what is there. I smell the flowers and the offal as well. I remain keenly in touch with reality, unless I am preoccupied with some business that I am working hard at. Then I am apart, and I scarcely notice a person who smiles at me. I am like Master Beethoven working on one of his symphonies while out walking the streets. The discipline of my craft has my brain engaged and if a dog barks or a man weeps it is like a bee buzzing in a spider web. I scarcely notice it. I figure it is someone else's concern. Something changed, me, though, and I lost that focus. As Kay Jamison said, I became "Touched with Fire." My perceptions changed. I became emotionally labile. I became more empathetic, more responsive to the world around me. I lost the exceedingly narrow focus of a student of science. The heavens opened and I became a source of torrential poetry. I called my poems "raindrops." I think it was Kay's brother who died of suicide, and this motivated her to study bipolar disorder. Check her out. In due time true Joy will create the superior society, in which there is sufficient comfort for all those who are in need. In every leader the cup of good humor will run over. In this new culture both scientists and poets will become much less narrowly focused and devoted to their speciality, and empathy will be taught to children. This is how men will grow up so that they are unable to bomb cities from the air or even program robot computers to annihilate people. This piece was caused by a weeping man being tortured by reality. The conventional preachers do not help. They stay holed up in their churches and they are not representative of the mythic Christ. On Sundays they crow like roosters standing atop their local church spires. The man who broke step and took a day off to comfort the suffering man presents the Example we need to study, more than any "holy" text. Composed in haste, some errors in this piece will be found. A gift of Jove=JHWH, the lightning flashes in haste and doesn't worry about offending people. Whatever else you might call IT, GOD is present in reality, in every compassionate heart. The heart's bright flame then is felt. ------------ About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and problem-solving. John has created art, music and songs, prose and poetry, and helped people solve a difficult problem. For more information, read: John's letters of recommendation: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/recommendations about John's self-healing and integration: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/index.html about John's independent research: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jlw47/index.html about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: http://www.writers.net/writers/39295 Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
