The Problem of Depth of Feeling in a Sibling World

“The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: ‘Human Life is very deep, and our dominant modern lifestyle is not.’” (Bo Lozoff)

“The higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. And going down into those waters is a sweet thing.” (Robert Bly, The Sibling Society)

Last Saturday morning, as Orin and I labored in January pre-dawn dark at cleaning the Café before opening at 8:00 a.m., a record of soul singer Bill Withers played in the background. The singer spoke about his grandmother and about her church which she brought him to at age five, and some very funny memories of his experiences there. He ended the little digression saying, with emotion, “I love that ol’ lady! I love that ol’lady!” Then he broke into song, “My Grandma’s Hands,” his marvelous voice filled with the abundance of feeling we turn to soul music for.

Who was this woman who inspired the boy Bill with such devotion? A black woman, insignificant in the larger scheme of things, and in white, affluent society in particular. A woman devoted, in her turn, to the church and to her Lord. The scene, in my view of it, contains a silent partner most modern white people, trained in the modern way to shallowness, can’t grasp fully. The partner speaks to us powerfully in the music, but the Source is out of reach and beyond the understanding of those of us weaned on rationalism. And that God-and-pain-drenched atmosphere of the black church is where Bill Withers learned to sing in the sublime way we turn to soul and gospel music for.

What our “dominant modern lifestyle” cannot teach is that great heights of spirit depend upon great depths of feeling. The experience of the pain of the depths makes possible the soaring eloquence of a Sam Cooke singing “If I could just touch the hem of his garment...” Bill’s Grandma’s church was filled with joy, but the joy found its way in because hearts there knew unspeakable, unrelievable, completely unearned pain. But increasingly, depth of feeling is something we overcome if we are successful. For those who still have it, perhaps we think, if we allow ourselves such un -P.C. thoughts, this capacity for feeling is what allows them to deal with the tragedy, the misfortune, the unrelenting oppression that life in our civilization brings them. They need this capacity to have all this emotionality in a way that we who no longer need to suffer so, do not need any longer. We insist on maintaining an optimism that would be incomprehensible to Bill’s Grandma.

This refusal of our depths is what Robert Bly wrote about in The Sibling Society, a book I’ve been reading in a spiritual study group called Temenos. The loss of verticality ( the word Bly uses for the ordering principle in society once covered, with much collateral damage, by God, patriarchy, its institutions) results in the loss of adults, an adult being one “who has been able to preserve his or her intensities.” A major consequence of the loss of the vertical dimension is the triumph of mass society. Mass society refers to the change in location of power, from within persons and local communities to a small “ruling elite” who control and manipulate the entire society in a top-down manner. A society of adults in the sense Bly is speaking of would not be so easily “massified” as we have been.


But preserving our intensities means taking a ride on the “down” elevator. It means recognizing and bearing the bleakness, both inner and outer. Instead, we get art that carries “a single-minded optimism...that leaves out all drowning.” When offered the waters of “melancholy and tragedy,” we moderns say, well, uh, on second thought no thanks. I’ll take that wonderfully reliable (reliable in that it will not truly disturb) Hollywood movie or wacky conceptual art show instead.

Listening to Bill Withers speak about his grandmother reminded me of one of my first experiences of conscious deep feeling in relation to a human being. Long after she died, just mentioning my Italian husband’s grandmother Lucy’s name would bring tears flowing from my eyes, and my heart would be flooded with feeling. How, you might ask, could having feeling for a dead grandmother be remarkable unless one were some sort of cold-blooded WASPy ice goddess? I suppose that is exactly what I was raised to be. I had previously lost 4 grandparents, and never felt this luxuriance of pure feeling, of grief. Up until Lucy’s death when I was in my late 30's I had never consciously grieved, not because I had never loved anyone, but because in the relationships I had known, deep feeling, and any knowledge of “the vertical,” (of, say, a reality larger than my parents), was not part of the experience.

The feeling connection to Lucy was a consequence of a confluence of factors both outer and inner, on her end and on mine, but key among these, I am certain, was her Catholicism; the verticality a lifetime of devotion had given her which allowed for her expression of deep feeling. Having grown up in a nominally protestant, non-religious household, I had never known an adult who could speak so honestly of her sorrows, weeping without embarrassment, and who could laugh so heartily as well. These were astonishments to me. Married to a renowned philanderer, forced to work very hard even though her in-laws were wealthy, Lucy had cause for bitterness. But always, in recounting her stories, she left accusations out of the telling. She may have been doing her work of preparing for her end, in these sweet and intense sessions of memory, laughter and tears, certainly she spoke openly and acceptingly of that end approaching. This, too, - any relation to death other than pure denial - was far outside my previous experience. Although, as I have been reminded many times since her death in the late 1980's, her relationship with her son and his family was complicated and even abusive, deeply ambivalent, and lastingly scarring, none of which I refute, for me she provided my first relationship in which real depth of feeling was allowed.

For the doubters among you, these two examples may not be enough evidence to prove the connection between deep feeling and verticality. For myself, the discovery of my inner depths amounted to the Second Birth, expelling me at last from a barren, falsely flattened existence that I could only realize in retrospect. When I was in it, it and my constant depression, were simply “normal.” God save us all from that normality! Though like many others raised in modernity, I knew nothing of the depths and heights of feeling made possible by what Bly calls “vertical longing,” I learned that I cannot have my native spirit and energy without "the depths," and the portal to those depths passes through God. The word (God), so objectionable to many in the sibling society, is as good as any, as long as we’re clear we’re speaking of an experience available to anyone willing to suffer her own pain.

It is precisely God that can save us from succumbing completely to mass society. And I speak of God not only as the author of Christian scripture or all scriptures, but as the authoritative energy within that inspires our thoughts and words, and emboldens us to say no to the culture’s lie that humans are shallow, and community optional, and yes to the practices that reinforce connection to each individual’s ecstatic depths. This is a challenging message, not a McDonald’s Happy Meal one. We can continue to believe we are fortunate to have gotten beyond the primitive beliefs of people like Lucy, and Bill Withers’s Grandma, lucky to have freed ourselves from the necessity of mass every Sunday and weekly confession, the woman submissive to her husband, and other outworn dogmas. Who needs that guilt-inducing crap? But what is our option?

“Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.” Kabir