Thursday, July 8, 2010

An interview with the Urban Hermit, A Nobody for Our Time
By
Henry David Toro

Interested as I am in how people at all levels in our society are responding to the growing environmental calamity, and to what seem to be death throes of our western civilization, I determined to seek out individuals who characterize themselves as living out a response to this crisis, albeit not by means of traditional activist venues. Being myself a sort of deep ecologist, and knowing that nature thrives in diversity, I assume there have to be a multiplicity of these responses. The days of the mass movement driven by a collective ideology, to which individuals sacrifice their individual “light” for the greater good, are gone. Secretly, I have long envisioned a grassroots response guided not by ideology but by that which is innate, instinctual knowing of the individual. My anarchic vision would be for a change originating in individuals, in, metaphorically speaking, each grass root, each dandelion, each nondescript clover that we walk over without noticing, sort of a revolution of the “silent and plant-like,” salvation by the utterly unextraordinary.

My proclivities bring me with great interest to the Urban Hermit. It was her nom de plume at first that intrigued me. Its anonymous declaration of retreat from the world, following a tradition going back to the desert fathers, offered an interesting contrast to the mass striving for stardom, the desperate craving to be recognized in this massest of mass societies. In such a massified context, the central message of which is the replaceability of the individual, I wonder, how can we return to the spirit of localism, local economy and local culture, to the diversity that can challenge the corporate-powered centralized monoculture and its destructive, hell-bent joy ride.

So here, in the person of the Urban Hermit, is someone doing it, that is, choosing to be ordinary and to make a difference, to perhaps slow that apocalyptic joyride down simply by opening up the imaginative possibility of another way.

HDT: What is it like, being a hermit in modern life? And how do you feel being interviewed – an unlikely activity for a hermit?

U.R. First of all, Henry, everybody, or every adult, anyway, were we each able to reconnect with the invisible parts of ourselves, that is, with soul and spirit, is a hermit. Hermitry is simply a way of being whole. It is a metaphor for the particular individual located within the collective of society. What we have in mass society is a loss of that which is absolutely requisite for individuality. Human beings are imaginative as part of their intrinsic make-up; what is called “reality” must feed imagination as well as body, so to speak. We require, to be healthy, a basis which includes all parts of the human organism, rather than what we have, a materialist-defined reality that excludes spiritual reality. On the other hand, as you suggest, the last thing a mass person wants is obscurity, which has already been thrust upon her. Cut off from the stable context of community over time, families crumbling right and left, encouraged to follow a career climb that will bring one the material rewards of the culture, as well as identity and a measure of power, (but will further assure one’s estrangement from self and others), the choice to be anonymous and ordinary – a hermit - seems like choosing to be buried alive.

But the reason there is such distaste – not really distaste, but a lack of imagination about - for the local and the ordinary is precisely that materialist base. Outside of the materialist base, and that is an addictive context, by the way – since man cannot live on matter alone, the craving for spirit leads directly to addictions – if one can find her/his way there, it is possible to find a way to live human life meaningfully. Just as religion provided the context of meaning for generations before us, that realm of meaning is still open to she or he who will “knock.” The God that died - as Time magazine declared in the 60’s - was not the eternal reality that is beyond language, but the particular metaphoric version – the collective archetype - that guided western civilization since the middle ages or so.

As to being interviewed, it is a great treat for me. I have no rules against interacting with the society, but I do not seek it, even though I have mostly been convinced it will never come and discover me. In medieval times and later, if you read your Brothers Karamazov, (which I just did last year!) devout people sought out hermits for a perennial truth or a wisdom less bound by society’s fleeting standards. Did you see, by the way, Michael Caine’s brilliant performance as the hermit-hippie Jasper in the movie Children of Men? There is something undeniably nutty about us hermits, but, as with the Caine character, it is a principled nuttiness. Or better yet, a nuttiness that understands, with Blake, that the fool who will persist in his folly will become wise. Today we cannot understand someone who isn’t motivated by fame or status, whose creativity is driven not by ego but by the need to embody the wholeness prefigured in the Divine. Witness the general cluelessness regarding J.D. Salinger’s choice to do exactly what he had been led to do by the “divine” inspiration of his own writing: to become, in effect, a hermit. If we are to become a society of ordinary, common-as-daisy kings, that can bring humanity into its full flowering bloom by bloom, this change is necessary. It depends completely upon switching from the materialist base to the “spirit-in-matter” base.

H.D.T.: Two questions occur to me: what do you mean by the materialist base vs. the ‘spirit-in-matter” base, and what does it mean to “knock” on the door of the realm of meaning?

U.R. The materialist base is simply what we have in our culture to base meaning on. It is the view that the only real things are the things we can see, touch, eat – the things with physicality. There are many consequences to our having reduced reality in this fashion. We have only to switch our gaze cross-culturally and we can see that not all cultures are so drastically materialistic as we are, and that our extreme and strenuously defended (often in the name of “freedom”) materialism is a consequence of our affluence. Peasant cultures, for instance, where people have few to none of the things that for us make life interesting and “worth living,” often have an abundance of spirit. We enjoy being among these people; they make us feel comfortable, at home and “good enough,” in a way that our own cultural context does not. Indigenous cultures, where the separation is not made between spiritual and material the way it is here, do not base human worth according to the criteria of materialism, and can live meaningfully in circumstances we would consider “reduced.” To say nothing of the fact that they also know how to live harmoniously with nature, as we emphatically do not. I’ll say more about “spirit-in-matter” at some other point, but suffice to say it is a base for meaning (familiar to indigenous people but not to our deeply dualistic worldview) that rejects neither the material nor the spiritual. It is a “middle way” that is also the way of living harmoniously with the planet.

To answer your second question, I can use my own case. First of all, the expression, “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” probably is familiar to many in a historically Christian culture like ours. ("Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7) What door? That is what I might have responded with, had I given it that much thought, for much of my life. What I learned is that “the door” is not the door to belief, but to inner experience. Experience precedes belief, or ought to. And when one has experience, the matter of belief, and of different beliefs, is nullified. ( I suppose the fact that one calls a certain profound and private kind of experience “spiritual” or a “conversion” means that the mind decided to call the experience this and not that – which is a kind of belief This is precisely the reason we need guidance from tradition, so that such numinous, individual experience can be understood as being humanly meaningful. No matter how far out and obscure the images in a dream, for instance, we pay attention, and take insight from them if we understand these as being the voice of the soul.)

To materialist, rationally based people like myself, as I was raised to be, the matter of belief in God as promulgated by mainstream Christian churches is a serious stumbling block. My own situation was further complicated by the fact that my father, being an artist, moved the family a certain distance away from 100% acceptance of the materialist base. Clearly something else (i.e., my father’s painting) was very important which could not be explained materially. Perhaps partly for this reason, I would never get out of the cul-de-sac of materialism by surrendering my will to, essentially, the religion of Jesus defined by others. In my family, received, conventional wisdom already had a crack in it.

For whatever reason, I had to knock on the door for myself, the door, that is, of direct experience of the Divine. Sounds mystical, is mystical, but that doesn’t mean it’s at all exclusive. We are all mystics, as Matthew Fox among others points out. We are all mystics, but if we remain within the materialist, rationalist context we are not going to find this aspect of our nature. What is more, we will remain afraid of seeking that door. We will dismiss our wildest most profound dreaming, like Ebenezer Scrooge, as being caused by the modern, low-carb, high in Omega 3 equivalent of “ a bit of bad beef.”

My own discovery of the door was the result of a process prompted in part by the deeply unsettled state of mind I found myself in through much of my twenties and thirties. I was utterly clueless as to a path or a purpose in my life, though I ended up with a Masters degree in Divinity by 1979. Marital conflict was also a huge factor in the pain that was driving me toward exploring my inner realm by means of psychotherapy. Mind you, in my region of upstate NY, and this is still true, one does not discuss in public such things as analysis and psychotherapy. There was a sense at that time of moving out from the norms of my original culture even just in going to talk to a therapist about my depression. In combination with this was the fact that I had prepared for the Unitarian Universalist ministry and was serving a church in upstate NY during my 30’s (the 1980’s, roughly). This clergy identity was another way in which I was in, but not of, my local central NY culture. Because of the ideas afloat in liberal religious circles of that time, I began to delve into feminist spirituality, Jungian psychology, and eventually the 12 step recovery process. The process of finding out “what was wrong with me” was turning into a spiritual process! All of this culminated in the summer of 1988, after I had left my job in the church, declaring my need to “find out who I am.”

That July, my husband and I got ourselves down to Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania to attend a workshop offered by Ann Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes An Addict, Codependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated, and other books. The mantric phrase for the weekend, repeated often by Schaef, who encouraged personal reflection even to the extent of doing that rather than listening to her talks, was “Trust the process.” There I experienced, amidst much anguish that came up for me during the three days, the most profound awakening of my life thus far. It was Anne Schaef’s use of those words, “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you” that did it for me. For the first time I understood that the Christ was within me, and that that inner Christ (or
Self archetype, in Jungian terms) was what I must follow. My life up until that point had involved, even for our culture, an extraordinary amount of repression. I was so terrified of my interior I had avoided going near any kind of counseling or therapy during my 4 years of training for ministry, when my fellow ministers-in-training at Yale Div were flocking to it. I was terrified of that immersion that must have felt to me then like the threat of annihilation.

Well, dear reader, of course it was an annihilation! But what joy there was for me in that reunion with my lost Self, with my long-rejected soul! I cannot exaggerate. The experience at Kirkridge led to a greater commitment to 12 steps, to a conversion experience to belief in the Christian God, and to eventual confirmation as a Roman Catholic in 1990.

HDT: Yikes! Catholicism? From the perspective of the New Age, that could sound to some people like a great leap backward!

UR: Well, don’t forget, I was devoutly following my process – or my heart rather than my head - at that time. Catholicism appealed hugely to my starved protestant imagination. Also, it appealed to the powerful need I felt at that time for Father. Having been influenced by archetypal psychology and the comparative mythology preached by Joseph Campbell, I was certain that my being there in the Catholic church was part of the re-emergence of the feminine, of the Goddess, in that theology and tradition. I felt belonging as I had never known before or since, and the period of my Catholicism was great for my marriage as well. Everything was finally making sense. The fact that I was shunned by my liberal friends did not bother me. I was “On the road to find out,” as Cat Stevens, another convert to a scripture-based faith, used to sing.

HDT: I know from things you’ve written that this period of reprieve from “the struggle” for self knowledge ended with a kind of scary and profound collapse in early 1994. After all the work you had done at that point, which after all, was more change already than most people experience, and now you say things were going well with your spiritual life - why do you think this happened?

UH: Brief answer: With the new and strange experience of happiness I was having, I believe for the first time I was strong enough to experience the real initiation. Just recently I was reading an interview (The Sun) with Malidoma Some, the West African spiritual teacher and author, where he talks about the initiation experience. He mentions in a couple of places that in fact, initiates in his Dagara tribe do not always make it through the initiation. They die, literally. Initiation is real; it is an experience of coming against the power of nature, of the death-life-death cycle, of finality. This is the awareness of the initiated adult, not of the pre-initiated child. For all the work I had done, I was still not initiated. Through my first conversion, and the deep sense of safety and belonging it brought me - belonging in the sense of belonging in my life and also of belonging in a religious tradition - I had achieved innocence at last. Experience, that of meeting up with the dark aspect of God, was still ahead of me.

HDT: Are you saying that experience or initiation has to involve the actual risk of death or, as in your case, of madness?

UH: I am saying the process is not for the faint of heart, yes. On the other hand, I was faint of heart – never would have taken on the type of experience that forces one to face mortality in this way, which is perhaps why in my case the hand had to come up and pull me down. But remember, the path of initiation, while in many cases brought on by an accumulation of pain from grief or loss, is also and equally the path of desire. Joseph Campbell’s oft-repeated adage Follow your bliss was intentionally meant to bring people into initiation. No way you can follow your bliss without meeting up with the Baba Yaga for real!

HDT: I don’t remember Campbell ever saying this. You make it sound as if he had an agenda beyond just teaching comparative mythology and encouraging folks to follow their true desire.

UH: It’s not hard to figure out. He was a teacher, remember. Everything he talked about was there by intention to help convey his teaching. Remember his showing us the planet earth as seen from space, and telling us we need a new mythology that crosses boundaries and will include the planet? He preached a revolutionary message, but subtly, as befitted someone who actually thought about his audience. As he pointed out, if you are out there preaching against the status quo, you too will risk crucifixion. I hear his story about the tiger and the goats as being exactly about this issue, and as explaining his choice to “appear as” a mellow, kindly, tweedy college professor – an acceptable persona in our society. That’s what he truly was, but he was also, and really, the tiger.

HDT: As we all are.

UH: As we all are.

Interview to be continued. Next installment, the interviewer asks the Urban Hermit to talk about” spirit in matter” in an accessible way.

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