Be with us now

 

In the depths of the lockdown, in the middle of my fortnight's stay at a quarantine hotel, I saw my friend. He was standing there at the end of my bed. He was smiling, and exuding the same bonhomie as ever. But the feeling I had upon seeing him wasn't joy. Why not? Because he had died a few months earlier. 

If I was living in a less rationalistic culture - any other culture than the one I do live in - I have no doubt I would be talking about that episode as the visitation of a ghost, spirit, or angel. As it is, I'm more inclined to believe it was a dream. Though maybe a dream of a particular sort, born of particular circumstances. 

I'm talking about lockdown dreams, the particularly vivid dreams that people have been reporting after weeks of being cooped up at home or in a hotel, sometimes without seeing another living person for weeks on end. These dreams come in different shapes and sizes, and not all of them involve people, but the ones that do suggest an obvious explanation. Are these dreams the result of our brains' effort to make up for the lack of human contact by providing us with the images of our friends?

It's interesting to me that, in the same period that I had the dream I mentioned, I was also praying to Mary with the rosary, something I'd never done before in my life (I've never been a Catholic, and I'm not one now). There were other reasons for that (I'd just been in a city with some beautiful Catholic churches, where I'd been exposed to and drawn to the practice), but it has struck me that it is a style of meditation that involves, first and foremost, calling upon a figure, a personality, a person.

Prayer, of course, often works in this way. Christians call upon God, Jesus, Mary, and various other saints. Muslims call upon Allah. Buddhists call upon Buddha and numerous bodhisattvas and spirits (and sometimes even visualise them as a form of meditation). Ancient Greeks who were ailing would call upon the healing God Asclepius and then go to sleep in one of his sanctuaries, where he would then appear to them in dreams. 

There are many reasons why people pray, but one may just be loneliness. We want another presence in the room, in our lives, for the night. In a sense, religious activity is a way of inviting people over, for dinner, say, and is often figured as such - the Greeks imagined the gods enjoying the smoke from their sacrificial feasts, and the Christian Eucharist re-enacts the Last Supper, seeing Christ as really (or symbolically) present once again. 

The many different forms of religious ritual obviously imagine different sorts of togetherness with different supernatural guests. And, as with ordinary guests, we may want to invite them over for different reasons. We may want to invite over someone powerful and reassuring, someone who will allow us to sleep with some sense of safety. We may want a mother-figure to smile down on us and tell us everything will be alright. We may want a raucous fellow-reveller like Dionysos.

None of this is to suggest that sending out invitations of this sort is necessarily a silly thing to do, even if we don't happen to believe that any of the guests are really going to be there. Whether or not we find it silly may, in any case, in some sense be neither here nor there. It may simply be something we humans do during lockdowns, in the desert, in the hour of our death. We find other ways of having our friends over, other ways of seeing them. 

Bow, wow

My first Greek teacher at school was one of those wizened, old-school schoolmasters they don't seem to make anymore. He was a deeply civilized man - he played the cello and the piano to concert standard as well as being able to talk more entertainingly about Cicero (an advanced skill in itself). He was usually kindly and often humorous, but he also had a stern side. I remember him leaning over my friend (who had just farted in class), his face inches away, pronouncing, very distinctly, 'Let nothing get in the way of learning!' It was rumoured he'd been in the SAS. When we got too rowdy supporting the First XV he would simply walk along the touchline and we'd all go quiet.

It was the same walk as he had in chapel. Somehow he was always the last one in, though I don't think that was an official role. We'd all be fidgeting, gossiping, poking each other with compasses, that sort of thing. He would walk down the aisle, his clipping shoes sealing up the silence behind him like he was zipping up the door of a tent. And when he got to the end, he would bow his head to the altar.

It was interesting to me partly because he was usually so upright. Later I encountered the same oscillation between bowing and upright posture at the San Francisco Zen Centre. It took me years of experience with different Buddhist groups before I could put aside my distaste for bowing to Buddha statues. Whether it was a Western egalitarianism or a Protestant distaste for idols, I didn't like it. Part of me still doesn't. And - something it's taken me years to admit to myself - part of me does.

The rationale for the formal postures they have at Western Zen centres tends to focus on mindfulness. Bowing and then standing upright and so on at different times certainly does require a certain alertness, but there's also something else going on. Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the SF centre, apparently tripled the number of bows there because he thought Westerners needed to 'get their heads down.' The Tibetans who do full protestations have a phrase about that practice as a way to 'turn the cup upside down.' Bowing is, in other words, a way of practising and cultivating humility.

But it can also go deeper. Pack animals that have clear hierarchies in the wild - dogs, for example - seem to feel more secure in the presence of a undisputed top dog (a role human owners have stepped into). We may have something of this in ourselves. Bowing to Christ or the Buddha may be as much about handing over responsibility to them as anything else. And surrendering responsibility over ourselves is something we seem to find strangely comforting. There's something of this in the erotic sphere too, with a whole subculture of people who enjoy putting themselves in subordinate positions. Kneeling as part of oral sex and as part of religious ritual may not be as far apart as we like to think (a similarity that's been noted by generations of poets).

An increase in humility in one person is often accompanied by a growth in pride somewhere else, though, and humility can sit dangerously close to humiliation. That's what used to give me the willies about bowing, and still does occasionally. The Kings of Persia used to demand a full prostration from their vassals, something the Greeks called proskynesis. (Earlier, Kings of Assyria had required the same form of obeisance; below is the black obelisk of Shalmeneser III, who is standing over the defeated Jehu of Israel). When Alexander the Great started demanding similar treatment, his Greek and Macedonian peers took it as a sign of a slide towards tyranny. Forcing people into head-down positions and onto the ground can be elements of torture, featured from medieval heresy trials to the prisons at Abu Ghraib.

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's ritual of 'taking a knee' in protest against perceived injustice has now been more widely adopted as part of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement. The posture is uncannily similar to the way Catholics genuflect to the altar. That, of course, isn't necessarily to the discredit either of the protests or of Catholicism. As we've seen, bowing clearly has deep roots in human psychology as an expression of devotion. It's a central part of the human palette of gestures, as much as hugging someone or jumping for joy.

As the same time, given its potential for abuse it's easy to see why some (like the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab) have refused to take a knee, seeing it as a symbol of submission. That it clearly is, though perhaps what's really going on in such cases isn't a distaste for submission in any context, but simply for submission to that particular cause (and Raab did indicate that he would bend the knee for the Queen). My old Greek master bowed to his idea of God, but apparently not for much else. This might be part of the point of religious types of bowing, to find a way of satisfying the human urge for submission in a way that nonetheless preserves our independence. Whether that works out in practice will depend partly on your idea of God.

Others will particularize their acts of submission, holding their heads up high in everyday life while choosing not to in certain contexts. But it might make sense to always remain a little on guard wherever we choose to bow our heads. I know it's possible to get too hung up on this; after all, bowing is a very common way simply of greeting other people across the Far East. But when it comes to more ritualized bowing, the kind of bowing that turns your heart upside down, it might be worth choosing your masters wisely. Be careful, in other words, what you bow to.

Why is chess stressful (but the Eucharist is not)?

Despite its image as a sleepy past-time, chess can be stressful. Players' heart-rates rise and fall dramatically during games. Top grandmasters can expend thousands of calories during tournaments, shedding alarming amounts of weight as a result. Players have even died of heart failure in the middle of competitive matches, crushed by the pressure they were putting on their system.

What makes this sedentary pursuit so stressful? Two things. One is the presence uncertainty and of threats - to your position, to your King, and ultimately to your pride - something which is bound to activate our hard-wired 'fight or flight' response and everything it brings in its train (like an increased heart-rate). The other is the need to make decisions.

Decision-making is, of course, the stuff of life. And it's exhausting - in a way that has now been tracked, measured, and given a label: 'decision fatigue.' The more decisions you make, the more tired the 'executive' parts of your brain get, and the worse you get at decision-making. It's why even top top chess players can make embarrassing blunders near the end of grueling matches. It's also why busy executives have taken steps to reduce the number of decisions they make in a day. President Obama had a chef decide his food for him. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes.

If we find uncertainty and threats - and the related need to decide how to react to them - unpleasant, it should be no surprise that we also find environments in which we don't have to deal with these things more amenable. This is what a lot of rituals and religious practices do: they set up a programme of repetitive movements or phrases, repeated over time, which are almost completely predictable. That predictability removes any uncertainty. It removes any threats. And it removes the need for us to make, or take, any decisions.

The problem is, we actually like making decisions. More precisely, though we don't always enjoy the actual experience of having to make our minds up, especially when there's a lot at stake, we like being able to make decisions for ourselves, especially when there's a lot at stake. That's basically what autonomy or freedom is, something people often want to defend, even to the point of extreme hardship or death.

This, then, is what makes chess stressful and the Eucharist not. One presents us with threats (even if of a purely intellectual kind) and forces to make a series of difficult decisions quickly. The other temporarily suspends our decision-making, banishes all threats, does away with uncertainty. The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that this is also why we enjoy music. Listening to a sequence of notes, in fact, involves even less activity on our part. It is, in a sense, pure ritual.

But it also involves a suspension of our agency. And agency or autonomy, as we've seen, is also something we want. It's crucial, then, to find a balance between activities that allow us to rest by putting our agency in cold-storage, and those that force us to do things in the world - stressful as that is. And it might be crucial not just for individuals, but also for societies.

That's not just because both things are good, but because in this as in other contexts, rest, besides being pleasant in itself, improves and freshens action, and action, in the final analysis, is what life is made of. Occasionally surrendering our freedom - if only in specific, tightly-constrained ways - might allow us to defend and exercise it all the more energetically.

The Rediscovery of Johnny Baloney

Another thing it turns out I'm ignorant about (although I might have suspected it) is the short-lived but spectacular flowering of cast-bronze sculpture in southern Germany around 1600. This took place mainly in Munich, seat of the Wittelsbach princes, and Augsburg, home of the HNW Fuggers - no coincidence, since casting large-scale sculptures is bronze is enormously expensive. The 'Neptune ...taming a sea-horse...which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me' that the speaker of Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' draws his guest's attention towards is supposed to speak loudly about his spending-power. It's also a quiet reminder of a river of artistic influence on which bronze deities of all sorts flowed between northern Italians states and southern German ones as the 16th century drew to a close. 

At the head of this river was a Dutchman, usually known by the less than compellingly Dutch name Giambologna (French Jean de Boulogne). A portrait of him by Hendrick Goltzius (more convincing Dutch name) is above, partly so that he'll stand at the head of a river of images in this post. And partly as a thanks for leading, directly or indirectly, to the flood of monumental bronzes that visitors to Munich can now wade into. 

There's at least one weighty tome on this topic by others who know vastly more about it than I do. So instead of trying to write anything much about it, here's a quick intro in images.

Let's start with two works by Giambologna himself, both on classical themes: the Rape of the Sabines (1574-82) and Hercules and Nessus (1599), both now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

Literal tonnes of smaller bronze versions of these are around (including in a room in the Bayerisches Staatsmuseum  in which my personal rediscovery of Johnny Baloney was made). Some are better than others; here are two chosen at random:

One bronze in Munich that is by Giambologna himself is the towering crucifix in Michaelskirche, a gift to the Wittelsbachs by their fellow jet-setters the Medici. There was a connection there, with Albrecht V of Bavaria's sister-in-law marrying Francesco de Medici in 1565. And, of course, their wedding forged a link in the bronze-casting chain, with Hubert Gerhard, a student of Giambologna,  going on to work for both the Fuggers in Augsburg and the Wittelsbachs in Munich. Here are two examples of his efforts, the archangel Michael defeating Lucifer on the facade of the Michaelskirche, and Perseus holding up the head of Medusa (this one in the Wittelsbachs' Residenz palace in Munich):

Soon the Wittelsbachs decided to breed their own sculptors by sending talented sons of Bayern to Florence. Two of the most successful of the new crop were Hanses Reichle and Krumper. Here's another Michael by the one Hans, above the entrance to the Zeughaus in Augsburg; and the tomb monument of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV (a Wittelsbach) by the other Hans, in the Munich Frauenkirche:

I've saved probably the most recognizable of Giambologna's works for last, the Flying Mercury from around 1580. This one has been extensively copied and played off, and has turned up all over Europe - including, of course, in the Wittlesbach's home in Munich. What better image of the swiftness and borderlessness of artistic influence could there be?

Meditations on the rosary

Recently I started praying the rosary. That may not sound unusual, but it was something of a surprise to me, since I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian (except in an attenuated, cultural sense), nor even a theist (that is, I don't believe in a personal God distinct from the world yet active in it). So why am I doing it?

The proximate cause was the power of context. Specifically, I was lucky enough to have time in the first couple months of this year to wander around some of the dozens of beautiful Gothic and baroque churches that are dotted around Munich and its environs. Poking my nose into the Theatinerkirche one day, I heard a prayer being recited over the loudspeaker, and I decided to sit for a while to figure out what it was.

It helped that it was in German, a language I thought I knew but was trying to get back up to speed with. It also helped (if that's the word), that six of the years since my last stint in Germany were in California, where I got deep into a hippy version of Buddhism.

The California hippy Buddhism I got deep into encouraged us to look at religious activity just as a kind of practice, and an experimental one at that. (Unlike Greco-Roman religion, it's not even 'orthopraxic,' since engaging in certain practices isn't seen as madatory.) 

After I'd recited a few hundred verses of Japanese (a language I really don't know) as a kind of psychological experiment on myself, I started looking at Christian worship with fresh eyes. Why couldn't I just look at Christian practices like the Eucharist as a practice, without getting into the question of whether the claims made about it were true?

Well, one of the reasons is that official Catholic teaching, in particular, requires you to believe certain claims in order to take part. That's an impasse I'll come back to in this post and, no doubt, on this blog. But nobody has questioned me on what's going through my mind as I work through the rosary, at least not so far.

One of them is that I don't believe some of the things I'm saying (like that Mary is the mother of God), though others strike me as possibly true (like that Jesus was crucified with a crown of thorns). But that's probably not the most interesting thought I've had praying the rosary (if it turns out it is, the rest of the post will offer you diminishing returns). Nor is the way I feel it's such an unexpected and interesting thing, something I need to explain (surely a product of being Protestant by upbringing, a kind of cultural identity it takes occasions like this for me to even notice, but is apparently there.)

A couple of other things have occurred to me too, in the odd way they seem to when you're engaged in a meditation practice focused on focusing on something else. So here are some rather secular meditations on the rosary, with hopes that Christian readers will forgive me.

One interesting thing about the rosary is how it features a combination of repetition and variation - variations on a theme, as it were. The main bit, the Ave Maria ('Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' etc.), is recited fifty times, but there are also five 'Our fathers' between each set of ten Ave Marias, and there's a distinct lead-in to the whole exercise. And on top of that, after each 'Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' there's a different descriptive phrase about Jesus which varies depending on what set of ten you're on, what day of the week, and can also vary depending on the season (Lent) say, and what specific tradition you're following.

Catholics will no doubt find all this pretty familiar and banal, but it's interesting to me as something you see in so many religious traditions - in fact, this combination of repetition and variation is basically what ritual of any sort boils down to. In the San Francisco Zen Center, I remember a lot of the California Buddhists offering explanations of that sort of thing in terms of mindfulness practice. (Justifications in terms of tradition didn't seem to have as much purchase in the Haight as in some other places I've lived.) Paying attention to bowing correctly was meant to snap you out of your thoughts and bring you back to the present moment.

But I'm also interested in how the variations might add to your attentiveness. It's something scholars used to write about poetry - that the slight variations poets introduced to regular metrical schemes kept the readers' attention. When you have to perform or recite something yourself, it makes you use that bit more cognitive energy. You could mindlessly recite the Ave Maria a hundred times, but whether you could do so while getting the added descriptive phrases about Jesus right is another question.

All this talk of Buddhist meditation has reminded me of another thing that caught my attention - the theory that this Christian form of devotion using a chain of beads might actually have originated in Buddhist practice. (I've also recited 'karmapa chenno' and such things with beads in Buddhist contexts.) I have no idea how respectable this theory is, and I can't find any solid evidence for it. But having recently read Thomas McEvilly's huge book on possible transmissions of philosophical and spiritual ideas from East to West, I do believe I'm credulous. 

The final thought, as often at the end of a meditation session, is a practical one. This time it isn't 'Right, I'm going to send him that email' or anything like that, but a modest proposal to the Catholic Church to transform the way it presents itself. More precisely and generally, I do wonder whether Christianity isn't losing out on a big opportunity.

There's an enormous market of attention for meditation in the West, and (as I exemplify) young people in the West are quite willing to recite things they don't believe, and seem alien to them, if it's presented as a way of calming the mind.

Personally, I believe that's actually the most honest way of presenting practices like the rosary, since I don't personally believe many of the religious claims that often go along with them (as with the rosary). But even if you do believe in those more concrete claims, presenting them as a practice others can share in might be an interesting way of reaching out, and of inviting outsiders into your own contemplative tradition.

Don't get me wrong: some people really believe what they're reciting, and I respect that. What isn't clear to me is what trouble it causes to have others who don't believe them reciting them for their own reasons. In any case, as I say, so far nobody has objected to me praying the rosary with my own funny thoughts in my head.

It's an interesting irony of my own spiritual life that I was raised in a tradition (Christianity) that has its own rich mystical history, but when I felt the need for contemplative experiences I headed increasingly Eastward (all the way, in fact, to California). Was that because hippies seemed more hip than Anglicans, and Buddhism more exotic? Yes. But it's also, I think, because Christian churches are, in my experience, oddly embarrassed about the more direct mystical strains that most of them have holed up, like eccentric elderly relatives, in their attics.

Accomplished accomplices

The other day I went on a day-trip to the city of Augsburg, just outside of Munich. It's well worth a visit: for centuries an autonomous city-state within the Holy Roman Empire, it's a very pleasant place to wander around, and has, besides, a number of interesting things to see. There's the cathedral (with an excellent museum attached to it), the Golden Hall (which richly deserves its name) in the Town Hall, and the Fuggerei, one of the world's earliest experiments of social housing, set up by the Fuggers, the Silicon Valley billionaires of their day. (Rent was set at one Rhenish Guilder back in the 16th century, and you can still live there for €0.88 a year - all you have to do is say a few prayers each day for the souls of the Fugger family). 

Just down the river from the Fuggerei, another extraordinary encouragement to prayer was being constructed around the same time. These are the three enormous late Gothic/early Baroque altars set up in the church of local saints Ulrich and Afra. (There are actually two churches - one Protestant and one Catholic - in what used to be an independent monastic complex. The ornate altars I'm talking about are obviously in the Catholic one.) These are the work of the Bavarian master Hans Degler, and you can get a sense of them in the picture above. Only a sense, though - I couldn't really find any photos online that succeeded in reproducing the effect of entering the church with the light falling in late winter, and seeing these enormous, shadowy structures looming at the far end of the nave. 

What's so wondrous about them isn't only their hugeness, but also the proliferation of figures crowded into them and hanging off them, like on an Indian commuter train (or, indeed, a Hindu temple). The southern altar (on the right) shows Christ rising from the dead (apparently with a Swiss flag), with Augustine on one side of him and Ambrosius on the left. The northern altar (on the left) is dedicated to the Holy Spirit possessing the Apostles at Pentecost (fifty days, as the Greek term suggests, after the resurrection). It's also dedicated to St. Afra, and shows her martyrdom, in the presence of Saints Ursula, Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara and Cecilia. 

Finally, there's the high altar, in the middle of the picture above, marked with a cross. (Of course, all of the altars are high, but this one earns its name with five stories, one more than the others have.) At the centre of this one is the familiar scene of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. One story above him, his mother is being crowned, with Peter and Paul the paid bouncers beside her. 

And that's only a pathetically quick description of some of the main figures. I've left out Gregory and Jerome (Fathers of the Church); Saints Rochus and Sebastian; and Mary as Queen of the Martyrs, among many others. And as a matter of fact, it's this super-abundance of focal points that got me thinking on the forty-minute train trip back to Munich. As a good non-theist with an interest (both senses) in meditative techniques, I've been praying the Hail Mary, you see, and one of the things that popped into my mind was the Marian motto 'to Jesus through Mary.' 

Another thing that I was reminded of after staring at those altars was the 'refuge tree' I'd encountered at Diamond Way Buddhist centres. Again the proliferation of figures, deities and semi-deities, Buddhas male and female, young and old, green and blue and white. 

One question that might occur to us when looking at such things is why a monotheistic religion needs them - not to mention a religion which, technically, isn't focused on a divinity at all. If the point is God/Jesus, what's the point of contemplating the saints? And if the point is awakening, or (at a pinch) the Buddha as a guide to awakening, why the profusion of spinning green houris? 

One idea I had is that omething like the following might be going on. As we're always being told (by science as much as religion) the human mind is weak and easily distracted. Because of that, even the simple techniques that have grown up with the idea of calming or strengthening it are quite hard to do - at least, they're hard to do with any degree of success (if by success you mean succeeding on focusing on something without your mind wandering). If you sit someone down in front of a crucifix or a Buddha, chances are their mind will wander to the closest new thing it comes across.

Why not, then, make sure the closest things it comes across guides it back to the meditation object? You could just put up more Jesus or Buddha statues (it's been tried), but the mind would probably just reject all of them in one go. But a saint or a minor Buddha that reminds you of a story involving the Anointed or Enlightened One - that's just the right amount of difference to catch the attention and draw it back. Maybe this is part of how the rosary works - by stringing us along with talk of Mary until we're subtly roped back into God through the changeable tags at the ends of the phrases (which usually tie in Jesus).

I don't know if there's been any scientific work or whether this is how these things really work in the minds of Catholics or Buddhists who dedicate themselves to the these practices. I also don't know of any very explicit passages in the writings of these religions which state that this is what's going on (or should be going on). If you know of any, please let me know in the comments below. If I've lost you at this point but you're still haunted by those altars I was describing before your mind wandered, I'd definitely recommend getting on a train from Munich and being haunted by them again up close.