A Revaluation of Renunciation

‘In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels it is simply mentioned that, at the conclusion of the celebration of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before he went forth. But in the (apocryphal) Acts of John…just before going out into the garden at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus says to the company, “Let us dance!” And they all hold hands in a circle and as they circle around him, Jesus sings, “Glory be to thee, Father.”’ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of that wheel of fortune you will either be above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are in the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow…”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” William Blake

How are we to live justly, peacefully, and deeply in this world? The last part of the question would not have had to be asked through much of human history; while war was omnipresent and justice evolving, still, people were not asked to live without meaning. Only in the modern age is that so, and I have always been grateful to Robert Bly, since first hearing of the mythopoetic men’s movement back in the 1980’s, for behaving as if this question, a religious one even though he speaks for no religion, were important.

As I see it, meaning depends upon things being in relationship with one another; meaning essentially is the fact of relationship, the fact that everything is connected whether we are behaving as if this deep truth were so or not. I will never forget the moment in my therapy, some 15 years ago, when I realized that I had learned my sense of extreme isolation, hauntingly conjured in my mind as an infant floating in space with no place to plug in its umbilical cord, in relation to others! Being in relation is the source of all good we humans can expect, and of all evil as well. But to behave as if we can reject the notion of deep interconnection is to be just plain wrong. And that is what modern life teaches us to do. And that error is what Robert Bly points us to in his book The Sibling Society, the book we’ve been reading in our Temenos group in Utica..

Bly’s perspective is rooted in archetypal, mythological, religious understanding that sees human life, individual and social, as inextricable from biology, nature, and from human community with its biology-driven, non-negotiable roles. These roles – father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother, husband, wife, etc. - partake of depth and meaning at the mythological level. They come to us not only or essentially through dictates of the church or law courts, not only through archaic beliefs just waiting for technology to make them anachronistic, but through archetypes passed on generationally, via “the blood.” I’m not a scientist, but archetypal psychologist Dr. Carl Jung was, and this was his contention.

Where Bly gets in trouble with readers is that he speaks from a mythological perspective to people who read literally, not metaphorically. Joseph Campbell was very patient with this problem also, explaining over and over what a metaphor is. God, of course, is such a metaphor, a word frequently used and understood literally, by both conservatives and liberals. In fact, I often wonder, what is the point of someone declaring herself to be an atheist? When I hear someone do that I want to respond: What, do you mean you don’t believe in a metaphor? Well, that’s downright silly. Oh, you mean you reject the God of judeo-christianity – oh, well, that is something different isn’t it??

It took me a long time to work up to the point when I could let go of my professional identity as a minister, back in the late 1980’s, even though I was very unhappy in that work and unsuited to it. The terror lurking for me was that without that identity, there was no me. I had never been able to imagine a work I wanted. Every so often, I would have an urge to go back to school for a graduate degree: school was the only identity I knew, even though I had no desire to be a scholar at that time. But I wanted and craved assignments. Oh Lord, remove this burden from me of my volition, I don’t know what to do with it and it frightens me. When I took the plunge and quit my profession, it was a leap without a net. My simple determination was to find out if there was a me. My secret belief was that there was not, but I had no choice but to find out for sure.

When I emerged from the more intense stages of my inner journey, in the late 90’s, no beam of light awaited me to answer this question I was most desperate to hear answered: what should I pursue “professionally?” That cluelessness remains in place to this day, as I am poised to turn 59 next month. I was and am still compelled to respond only to my inner guidance system; I am never let off the hook on this. My work, it seems to me, has been to contemplate the experience of “uselessness,” of letting go, over and over, of the ideas for ambitions that are not authentically mine; they are “solutions” to a problem godless society gave me, but God did not give me.

In one area of work, however, I have persisted all of these years. That is the area of finding meaning in the traditional roles for a woman in society. The most reliable source for my “continuing ed” has been the alchemical crucible of marriage. After 32 years of experimentation in one marriage, I have determined that marriage makes sense not for reasons primarily of social stability, economic partnership, division of labor, sharing of parenting responsibilities, though all of these are distinct benefits. It makes sense because it is an undertaking initiated in desire, which, due to its scylla and charybdis -nature, and the renunciation required for the voyage, brings the partners willingly or not, into the realm of the mythological.

And here’s where my subject, which might be called the personal quest for meaning converges with the ecological crisis we face today

Few would argue that global catastrophe and the irrevocable destruction of the ecosystems we depend upon, call for us now to learn to live in accord with Nature’s truth: life as a circumscription, not the ever-expanding realm of possibility and free choice epitomized in the American lifestyle. Because marriage is a teacher nonpareil of renunciation, with its vows of forsaking all others, persisting in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, etc., the crisis jokingly referred to as “the honeymoon’s over” seems to me perfectly suited for teaching us what we now need to learn, the antithesis to the dominant ethos.

Moreover, we must learn a different sort of richness than the material, a more metaphorical abundance. Renunciation unaccompanied by delight is as false and one-sided as unimpeded appetite. The richness we must learn to seek is one made up not of ever increasing piles of stuff and opportunities to go wherever whenever, and not of absolute freedom, a fantasy which is fed to us and aided and abetted by our corporate dominated culture and its media priests. It is a richness not of this world, which on the other hand allows the full experience of the gift of this world and our numbered days on it.

The very best, most sure-fire door for entering the mystical, inner realm of non-material riches is crisis, that is, via an experience to which there is no solution, not technology, not cryonic immortality, not increasing our rights under the law, not power and might. Experiences of loss, of deep grief, of illness, aging and impending death offer such a portal. Marriage, endured through its excruciating impossibilities, is such a portal, the advantage of which is, through faithfulness to a vow that includes all of life’s limiting factors, it can bring you into eternity without anybody having to actually die!

The insight that Bly and others brought to me back in the 80’s was, first, the News from the universe is Good. The imperative to “follow your bliss” is an angelic call if there ever was one. But what I also heard was that following my bliss and taking up my responsibility for maintaining the roles bequeathed to me by my ancestors, including marriage, was the same thing. This was a message that helped me as I continued to keep myself in the fire of marriage. Although confirmation of the saneness of my lunacy came infrequently, in those too rare moments of illumination I saw clearly that everything gains its meaning from relationship, from the deep interconnection that make up the natural world and the human-made one. And relationship is indeed a binding, a restriction of very high order! This is “the big point,” so elusive in post-modern, deconstructed, contemporary society.

Those of us who have cut the cord with religion no longer are informed that meaning and joy are the rewards of the renunciations demanded by marriage and the limitations imposed by committed relationships. I was raised by a depressed mother who was very damaged by the inflexible social role assigned to women of her generation as housewife and mother only. Every woman on both sides of my family of her (“the greatest”) generation was damaged by the onerous restrictions of patriarchal marriage. They passed on their damage to me, as they could not possibly avoid doing. Today I am prepared to say that it was not the fact of their being wives, mothers, housewives per se that damaged them. It was not per se the fact that they were discouraged from seeking identity in the world of work that left them so wrecked. It was not only that they were treated as second class citizens and their work, as wives, mothers and housekeepers, unpaid and therefore not of serious worth. It was not only the excruciating isolation of the nuclear family that did them in. It was the fact that they and everyone else in our society has been robbed of the God-given river of meaning transmitted mythologically through our roles in society. .

Someone might argue, well what meaning is there if society does not reward your work with money, the only valuation it understands? Someone might argue what about gay couples and about single mothers and lesbian mothers and unmarried mothers and parents who need access to daycare? What about their needs? What about women’s reproductive rights? How is a focus on traditional roles going to address all of these variants on the “traditional” family? Sounds like back to “barefoot and pregnant (and quite possibly abused)” to me!

To me, these responses are fair questions and also they partake of the literalism of the atheist mentioned above, as do questions like “Well, what can I do if he won’t do his work?” or “After all, I’m entitled to my happiness,” etc. It is quite true, not much can be done to keep a marriage going if only one partner is doing the work. But the larger problem is, who is teaching people that marriage is a symbolon, ( a word provided by Bly in The Sibling Society) and the vow a means by which the longing for God will take you into the deep changeless realms of myth and meaning? Living in the sibling society, we no longer know that all of our most basic roles include these two “ends” of the symbolon. Having lost the other end completely, no wonder our imaginations have stopped working; and instead of thought we have reaction, defensiveness, an entrenched victim point of view. No wonder so much of our motivation is self-righteous, and self-justifying, designed ultimately to support the status quo rather than to heal and transform it.

The point I’d like to end with is that our “bliss,” though attainable through a highly personal, individual, solitary inner journey, can only be had in relationship; it is a function of community. Community has its transcendent (“body of Christ”), and its real world embodiment. The real world embodiment is not arbitrary, made up of infinitely replaceable parts, as we are taught in modern, disposable society. Each particular community contains all the good and all the evil we would ever expect to find in this world. Utopian experiments only worked until some individual wanted something for herself. Traditional religion, so to speak, has to face the fact that in the modern world, even the faithful take what they want and leave the rest. What we in our communities, from micro to macro representations of it, now have to learn is that community, with all of its restriction on our freedom, is the space for real (unmediated) presence and real difference.

Taking my marriage example as one level of community, this means that each marriage must call forth and honor the full presence, the full flowering of the other, which means honoring the intolerable differentness of the other. This inclusiveness, in turn, cannot happen if one partner or the other remains intolerant of the “different one” within himself or herself. In this way, the marriage alchemy works at the level of the individual, and the resulting community is comprised of two integrities, not two fragments leaning together for comfort (all the while growing an incendiary pile of resentments behind a door they implicitly agree never to open.) If we can manage this mutual integrity at the excruciating level of marital intimacy, maybe we have a chance at making peace, justice and harmony with nature work at other levels of our society and of global society.

At the same time that Bly calls for us to become adults, so we can stop passing on to our children soul-killing meaninglessness, what is implied also is that the “duty” to become adults, is at the same time the pursuit of our individual bliss. The authority that calls for surrender to duty comes not from without, but from the archetypes (the soul) within. To submit to this authority (to renounce) is also to surrender to our native, indigenous joy. Bliss and duty are not separate or mutually exclusive; they are the same. As the poet Rumi expressed it, We are drunk and this is the edge of the roof. Hallelujah!

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