French 'Madeleines'

I’m not sure this is legal, but I’m eating the delectable French ‘Madeleines’ my lovely French neighbor just gave me, while drinking English tea out of my husband’s Norwegian “Cream of Lutefisk Soup” mug.  It’s part of the new ‘permission’ I’m giving myself this Christmas and in the coming year to be bold and daring.

Sometimes lately, I hear the riotous Jovian laughter of the ironic kind (God's "got'cha" for my human presumption) that immediately follows upon a surfeit of Jovian joviality that sweeps all before it, taking hold of us poor mortals and subsequently delivering us into trouble before we realize it!  Like the other day, when I overstepped my authority because I was swept away in an excess of creative silliness and forgot correct committee protocol.  Fortunately, I pulled back from the brink and caught myself before things had gone too far.  I saw the Jovian ‘sucker punch’ coming before it landed:  “Me-thinks I hear the distant waves of Jovian irony about to break on the hard rocks of consciousness and smash me to bits," it occurred to me.  One can so easily be swept away by the creative impulse, especially when it all seems so innocent and in good fun.  The prerogative of the divinity of joviality, however, ought not to be dallied with by the human presumption of stealing even a small cinder of fire from the gods.  One must pay attention to the ‘overage’ — the excess of affect that sweeps all before it.  That's actually easier said than done sometimes.

That said, I still intend to be bold and daring by drinking English tea out of a Norwegian “Cream of Lutefisk Soup” mug while eating French ‘Madeleines’.  It’s the American thing to do.

Portal to the Numinous

Where is the portal to the numinous?  It used to be that animism (primitive cultures’ method) and later institutional, traditional religions provided this portal to the experience of God in our midst.  Many still find the latter capable of providing that portal.  But many throughout Western culture as a whole have lost the portal to contact the numinous and are floundering (or have just given up the quest) to find another “way out” of their soul’s discomfiture and a “way in” to that larger experience that is contact with the divine.   We have ‘lost the portal’ to our deepest reality as human beings and need to find another.  It occurs to me that the currently running television series “Once Upon a Time” (on ABC) is a modern myth of our ‘portal’ problem.  There are many false portals, with addictions (of all types) heading the list.  But the portal to the numinous experience is also clouded by the persistent, habituated negative patterns of behavior and thought processes of the ego that go ‘round and ‘round endlessly and un-fruitfully within each and every one of us. 

 

Traditional religious festivals (like Christmas and Easter for the Christian) have become incapable of competing with the shiny, ineluctable draw of consumerism and materialism which, for all their vapidity and illusion, provide a false, inadequate, empty facsimile of the dazzle and shimmering quality of a real encounter with the Holy at the center of the soul.  The soul longing for a true experience of God is not fooled by the encrustations, but sadly many do not even suspect that a genuine contact with the numinous is possible.  They have decided that it does not exist, so they no longer search for it, or they search for it in the wrong places.

Genuine contact with the numinous produces two totally opposite (i.e., paradoxical) reactions:

1. A “low”:  prostration, fear and trembling, a sense of un-cleaness and alienation from the divine, vulnerability and total inadequacy, and, if one can stay with the experience,
2. A “high”:  ecstasy, transport, connectedness with the divine, worship, adoration, love and enlargement of soul, inner knowledge and acceptance.

However, the individual faced with a numinous experience may never get beyond step 1 to step 2, because the experience is prematurely hijacked/truncated at the point where the individual feels condemned by their own conscience.  They cannot stay with the discomfort long enough to experience step 2.  At the point of feeling themselves condemned — or fearing that they will be condemned even more than they already secretly condemn themselves — many will simply stop the engagement with the numinous all together, flee in terror to the drug or the bottle or to some other distraction — anything not to have to encounter the ‘difficult’, ‘strange’, ‘unwieldy’, ‘uncontrollable’ numinous thing within their soul that has confronted them and “called them out” — anything, not to have to dreg up “all that stuff” within.  We want the “high” of inner transformation without having to experience the “low” of unbearable humiliation and inner crucifixion.  It cannot happen.

But if the individual can acknowledge both the truth and the discomfort of step 1, the conflict within the soul will “be seen” by the Numinous Presence and produce step 2:  grace, acceptance.  The individual simultaneously knows herself to be “KNOWN” by someTHING or someONE that confronts them and holds them ‘in thrall’.  They know that they have been “seen into” (“found out”) and “heard” (and being listened to deeply is tremendously healing in and of itself).  All subterfuge and hiding is ended.  One is completely and totally exposed and stripped to the bone.  It amounts to an inner crucifixion.  Impalement on the horns of the dilemma within the soul produces, if one can stay with the process of ‘dismemberment’, a mediating third thing: one’s unique individuality, prostrate-and-redeemed (to use ‘religious’ language), before the Divine Within, overcome by a love and acceptance such as one has never experienced before.

How to safely approach the numinous has been the goal of every ritual, every codex, and every form of religion known to humankind.  Words and rituals have always and will always accumulate around the numen and the numinous experience because we humans are impelled to try to come to grips with our experience.  But the verbal accretions that begin to surround the experience soon (in fact instantly) begin to separate the individual from the experience itself.  We are caught in a “catch-22”:  we must wrestle with ways of describing and coming to terms with such a fundamental experience, and yet our reflection on that experience instantly separates us from the immediacy of the experience itself. 

 

The numinous refuses and resists all conceptualizations and human efforts to “fence it in” and congeal it into dogma, because it is a unique experience, unique to each individual.  Neither science nor mental concepts deal very well with unique individual experience.  One of the functions of our carefully constructed mental concepts and dogmas is that they provide a “protective fence” from the direct experience and “attack” by the absolutely overwhelming nature of the numen, the Holy Other.  Without concepts and dogma, one feels “at sea”, “alone”, and completely vulnerable to confrontation with the Divine Within.  I repeat:  how to safely approach the numinous has been the goal of every ritual, every codex, and every form of religion known to humankind.  But here is the quandary:  Once the numinous experience is codified into religious dogma, into specific statements about the reality, it begins a process of alienation from the Source itself.  Furthermore, any re-conceptualization, any drastic re-statement of dogma threatens the imminent loss of the Immanent Numinous Presence, without which we founder and flounder back into despair and meaninglessness and truncated lives.

Rituals are far more resistant to change than concepts and dogma.  They hold and contain the mystery of the Holy Presence far longer.  That can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the ritual.  As any counselor will tell you, the ritual of the addict is of longer duration and obstinacy than the concepts devised to help the addict escape their self-destructive behaviors.  For many individuals, the rituals of the Church still retain their numinosity (their capacity to contain the numinous presence) and surprisingly, even for the lapsed apostate, those rituals may still retain the residue of an emotional “hold” even as the lapsed struggles with the archaic conceptualizations of the experience of The Holy.  One is faced with an experience that no longer “fits” the protocol of an institution, but that experience is nevertheless a fundamental experience of one’s reality.

What are we to do?  We must not run and hide.  We must not run headlong into busy-ness, addiction, consumerism, materialism, and the plethora of distractions that beckon and consume us.  We can be Quiet; we can be Attentive; we can be Aware of the suffering and need around us; we can be engaged in the process of Unfolding happening both within and without.

Confessions of an Unsophisticated Fool

I have always been amazed that beyond all reason, God seems to love and (sometimes) protect the naïve, unsophisticated fool.  Beyond all imaginable possibility, God seems to guide the misguided innocent out of difficulty into creativity and larger life.  

Barry Carlson (Development Officer at St. Olaf College) can be forgiven for not knowing whom he was talking to when he told the assembled reunion planning committee members in December (2014) of the feckless young graduate who tells her folks she’s decided to become a dancer and takes up residence in her parents’ basement after graduation.  In my case, he was not far off the mark.  It just wasn’t the basement, and it wasn’t until a year later — after I got back from Europe that I ended up there.  And actually, when I lived with them I did have a job.  In fact, I had several — one right after another:  cleaning apartments, scrubbing toilets, for which I was well-suited; and gophering at American Lutheran Church headquarters and BOMA (Building Offices Management Assoc.), along with miscellaneous temp jobs, for which I was not particularly suited.  I mean, Accountemps, really???

Nope, from almost the day after our graduation, the prospects were just not looking that good at all.  My good friend, Dana, and I had decided we were going to make ‘lots of money’ working for Jack Laugen in the St. Olaf Public Relations Department that summer.  Yeah, enough money to get us to Europe, where we were going to work our way all around the entire continent for a year — and maybe even get to Israel!  Yep, hand to god, that was the plan.  In the end, it actually worked out pretty well.  (Read on, or go to "The Mouse of the Lord" blogpost of March 2011.)  But during the summer of ’65, when all the rest of our classmates were going about more serious business, Dana and I were spending a night in a cow pasture outside of Dundas. 

As I said, the prospects were not good.  I could not possibly have imagined in May of 1965 that I would ever become an artist of the classical ballet, much less a master teacher of the art, and an author.  I don’t know how one gets from spending an entire night trapped by a herd of cows in the middle of a pasture on the outskirts of Dundas, Minnesota, to being the creator of a very large, full-length classical ballet.  The skills, foresight and intelligent planning required for the latter are in no way related to the total lack of judgment displayed by the other.

It's not that I was ever frivolous.  I've never been accused of that.  Quite the contrary, I was, if anything, overly serious, a true introvert and totally lacking in self-confidence, which did not preclude a certain stubbornness or erratic whimsy from 'leaking out' on occasion — or prevent idiotic behavior.  (In recent years, I'm afraid that the whimsy has become a gusher in order, I suppose, to balance the boatload of serious preoccupations I concern myself with in my inner thoughts and writings.)  No, I was not frivolous.  I worried about everything from an early age:  about my 'calling', about 'meaning', and about doing the right thing.  The Dundas episode seems an aberration.

The reassurance of “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures” did not help in this instance.  One wonders if the Psalmist ever actually spent a night in a pasture.  Certainly, the comforting experience referred to by the Psalmist was not Dana’s and my experience of spending that sleepless night in the cow pasture.  Quite frankly, the almost-certain trajectory that might reasonably have been anticipated for a life that began, post graduation, with finding oneself and one’s friend trapped by a herd of cattle overnight in a field outside of Dundas does not seem to jibe with the focus, organization and talent needed for much of anything!   The prospects just don’t look too good.  Had they known about it, my parents would have shaken their heads gravely and thought:  “We’ve failed.  We’ve spent thousands of dollars on her education, and the child is hopelessly lost and obviously does not have the good sense God gave.”

I do not think that Dr. Howard Hong, my college advisor, was trying to ‘off-load’ me onto some other unsuspecting professor, but certainly he saw this one coming:  He once suggested to me that I might change advisors, but I declined because (a), his field (Philosophy) suited ‘to a t’ my own philosophical bent of mind, and (b), since I had no plan for myself anyway in either of my chosen majors (Biology/Psychology), the minor detail that his field did not jibe with either of my majors could not, as far as I was concerned, be the deciding factor in my choice of college advisor.  

While others were preparing for graduate school, marching on Washington, dying in Viet Nam and going to Tuskeegee, my biggest concern was how not to break my ankle by stepping into a 12”-deep muddy hole made by the hoof of a 2,000-pound bovine and debating what my reaction should be to the potential slobberings of a curious cow.

My, how things change in 50 years!  After nearly 50 years of work as an artist and master teacher of the classical ballet, I’ve begun new endeavors and explorations in writing (children’s books, humor, memoir, anecdote and tomes pertaining to psychology, the collective unconscious and its expression in current cultural manifestations) — all of it, completely unforeseen and totally unimaginable that night in the cow pasture.

When the first glow of the coming dawn lit up the east, Dana and I made our way (carefully) back to our bikes to pedal back to the campus where Jack Laugen expected us for work.  We were ‘escorted’ for about a half mile by a black Labrador, nipping at our fast-pedaling heels and chastising us for our trespass.  The sight of us with our feet up on our handlebars while this ‘hound of God’ nipped at our heels is a picture I continue to hold in my imagination.  We were lucky to escape with such a light admonishment!  God continues to nip at my heels.

Well, we made it to Europe in October, and a month later, just before Thanksgiving (1965), found ourselves on Karen Bagger’s doorstep in Geneva, Switzerland.  The former Assistant Dean of Women at St. Olaf who had left there to work at the World Health Organization in Geneva and her roommate treated us to dinner and a puppet show in central Geneva — the kind of puppet show with the really BIG, almost life-sized, puppets.

We knew that the former St. Olaf chaplain, Cliff Swanson, and his wife, St. Olaf voice teacher, June Swanson, and their family were at the Ecumenical Institute somewhere in the vicinity of Geneva, but we did not know how to get in touch with them.  Karen made the contact, and we found ourselves the next day driving up the west side of Lake Geneva on narrow country roads through a blizzard to Celigny and Chateau de Bossey.  What normally takes maybe 20 minutes took several hours in an endless, wet, heavy snowfall.  Visibility was low and the snow piled up very quickly, so it was impossible to tell exactly where the road was at times as we drove past small farm houses.   I just tried not to drive into a ditch!  One turn was a little tricky in the slippery mess, and the car ended up nose-down in a small ditch against an embankment. “Oh, great! Now what?” we thought.  (There were, of course, no cell phones back then.)

Miraculously, not two minutes later, around the corner puttered a small black Renault.  It stopped.  Out jumped two men dressed all in black, with black stove-pipe hats!  The car was loaded with the tools of their trade.  They appeared to have just popped out of a stage production of “Mary Poppins”.  They were chimney sweeps!  They spoke no English, and we spoke next to no French, but obviously our situation needed no explanation.  They cheerfully picked up our car and put it back on the road.  (This was not the last time we would be thankful for a light-weight car, although the argument might well be made that had our car been heavier we might not have found ourselves in the predicament in the first place.)  The sweeps waved cheerfully and went on their way. 

We pressed on, looking for signs to tell us where in the heck we were.  We were lost in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm, and it was getting late.  We pondered if the folks at the Institute might send out dogs the next morning to locate our frozen bodies under the snow.  Then once again, as dumb luck would have it, we came upon a farm house, where we promptly got stuck in the farmyard.  The owner came out and graciously gave us directions and helped us on our way by giving us a push out of his front yard.  He must have been shaking his head over these two foreign imbecilic young people out in the storm without a clue where they were going.  Years later, I remain convinced that God protects fools with a frequency that is really quite astonishing.  We toodled on. 

 

Eyeing an open gate and the buildings of the Institute just across the open space, I assumed that this must be the road to the Institute.  I turned right.  Wrong move.  Once again, we found ourselves in the middle of a farmer’s field in snow up past the running boards of our little Citroen deux cheveau, which we had already begun to call our deux lapins (“two rabbits”), because its lawn-mower-sized engine had the propensity to lurch and hop forward instead of accelerating smoothly.  I had learned to drive our deux lapins’ stick shift only a month previously in conditions that were, like the blizzard, not for neophyte or the faint of heart:  smack dab in the middle of the madness of rush hour traffic in central Brussels!

Now, here we sat, with the remnants of our bread-and-cheese lunch scattered about our laps, not 100 yards from the Chateau de Bossey which we could see clearly through an opening in the trees on the other side of the field. We trudged through the snow to the Institute, embarrassed to admit our faux pas and ask for help.  Help was immediately and charmingly provided by two foreign theology students, who virtually picked up the car between them and hauled it back to the road, got it started and drove it around to the Chateau.  

Once at the institute, we were warmly greeted by Cliff and June Swanson and invited to dinner with the faculty and students, where we were introduced to the rest of the academic staff, the thirty or so theology students and ordained ministers taking post-graduate course work, the wait staff, and the manager of the Chateau facility, Madam Beguine.  We were given a small dormitory room for the night, since driving back to Geneva in the dark in the snowstorm would have been hazardous.  I suspect that Cliff Swanson, after talking to us about our hare-brained plans to work and travel, might have surreptitiously made the suggestion to Mdm. Beguine to hire us at least temporarily as staff in exchange for room and board.  Thus, Dana and I joined the ranks of the “Blue Angels”, young women who were the scullery maids, dish washers, waitresses, and toilet scrubbers at the Institute.  We were the only American “Blue Angels”; others were from Austria, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.   There were two Canadians as well, Karen and Sigrid, which was very nice for us.

Images of Chateau de Bossey, Celigny, Switzerland

The Chateau was a lovely French-style farm, with several out buildings, a small chapel, a large vegetable garden, and a long, broad sward that swept down to Lake Geneva. We were told that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton lived “just over there” down the road by the side of the lake.  Among the academic faculty of perhaps half a dozen highly respected theologians from around the globe was Dr. Wolfe, a very dignified and brilliant scholar from Germany. 

Christmas came.  Dr. Wolfe led the worship service in the small chapel on Christmas Eve.  Students, academics and I (perhaps the sole Blue Angel in attendance) were packed into the small, tight space. I was in the very back, listening in the candlelight to Dr. Wolfe’s deep voice and thick German accent as he proclaimed the words of the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah.  An atmosphere of holy sanctity permeated the small crucible of a space.  All was well until the familiar words, “For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” were read.  Unfortunately Germanic speakers have difficulty pronouncing “th”, so what was heard was a sonorous, “For ze mouse of ze Lord has spoken it!”

 

That did it. The beatific numinosity of the worship experience went, “Poof!”  To my utter chagrin and everlasting mortification, I began to giggle uncontrollably.  Desperately embarrassed, I tried every which way to stifle my laughter.  I faked a cough.  I covered my mouth, hung my head, sucked in my cheeks, all the while making strange humming and gurgling noises.  I suppose some charitable souls thought perhaps I might be ill.  I bent over with my head in my lap, holding my sides, gasping for air in that ludicrous position.  I imagined that notification of my aberrant behavior had already been (or would soon be) sent out by Madam Beguine to my parents.  I remember thinking:  "Mom and Dad will be totally aghast!"

In my defense, I was not laughing at the esteemed Dr. Wolfe’s accent but at an image that had suddenly popped up, totally unbidden, into my consciousness.  In my mind’s eye I saw the foot of the throne of God, with God’s robes flowing to the ground, almost, but not quite, covering God’s feet — and there, peeping out from underneath the robes, right next to the Almighty's enormous left foot, was a very small mouse!  The mouse was clearly speaking to God, perhaps advising God about important affairs.  Being much closer to the ground, and having those large ears, long whiskers, and an acute sense of smell, the mouse would have been in the very advantageous (albeit dangerous and perhaps unenviable) position of advising the Almighty on more mundane matters, I mused.

I desperately tried to focus on the service in an attempt to retrieve some semblance of decorum.  “Should I get up and leave?” I thought.  Getting up and walking out would only have drawn more attention to myself, and we introverts are absolutely deathly afraid of drawing attention to ourselves!  I was certain that people must be thinking, “How utterly rude that American girl is!  Has she absolutely no sense of propriety or reverence for the solemnity of the moment?”  Only in my imagination of course, but I supposed that Cliff and June Swanson, who were in attendance for the service, must be mortified by my behavior as well.  If they were not thinking, "A blotch on St. Olaf's reputation!" I was!  In that moment, I was convinced that the weight of world peace and U.S. diplomacy rested entirely on my shoulders.  I tried swallowing; I sounded like a cat struggling with a hairball.  The theology student sitting next to me was absolutely mystified, and although I later tried to explain my ‘apparition’ of the ‘mouse of the Lord’ to him, it somehow got lost in translation.

Madam Beguine had already seen to it that Dana was settled into an American family working as an aupere, so I don’t think that it was because of my inexcusable and mystifying behavior at the Christmas Eve service that she shortly thereafter found a position for me in the home of Ambassador Blumenthal, the American ambassador to the GAT talks in Geneva, and his wife.  I became the live-in nanny for the Blumenthal’s three girls, ferrying them to and from school and to after-school activities in the family’s old Mercedes.  I helped the girls with their homework, and once piled the three of them and Chrissy, their black Labrador, into the deux lapins to go on an excursion back to the Ecumenical Institute.  I climbed trees with them, and we played ball in the expansive embassadorial front yard with Chrissy, who was considerably more friendly than the black Lab who had chased Dana and me out of Dundas the previous summer!


So, parents and grandparents:  If while reading this you you've found yourself saying, "We've got one of those dreamy-eyed kids, too!" take heart!  If you have done your best, all may yet turn out well for your naive, well-intentioned young dreamer.  If their heart is true, and they remain true to themselves, their lives will blossom into wonderful, creative things that are a boon to many.