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| October 1998 Volume I, Number 1 | ||
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Learning
to See Wonderful Things
The Titanic Our
Vain Cathedrals Hope for the Amateur Gardener A
Letter From Mepkin Note: When Volume I, Numbers 1 and 2 of The Symposium came out, we frankly had no idea how popular it would become. We have received an overwhelming number of requests for hard copies, and we just didn't print enough. Sorry, we're out! We are publishing all available material on these Web pages. Starting with number 3, we started printing a lot more...
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 Learning to See Wonderful Things(top) August Turak Executive Director, SKS I met Terri in the mid-eighties, while we were working together at a cable TV company. We soon developed a strong friendship as well as a good working relationship. After I moved to North Carolina, we kept in touch--though, as might be expected, less and less as the years rolled by. Recently, in hopes of making up for lost time, I went to spend a weekend with her in Birmingham. It didn't work. To our mutual disappointment, we no longer have anything in common. All she is interested in is her career, her love life, sports, and travel. And all I am interested in that magnificent obsession loosely described as spiritual searching. As I tried to describe my recent trip to Mepkin monastery, her reaction was apathetic at best--maybe even contemptuous. Our conversations were awkward and our silences were tense. We finally decided to just go out and have fun together, and wound up at a museum full of interactive science exhibits. We both had fun, and afterward, Terri asked me what I’d thought about it. "You know," I remarked, "next to each exhibit was an explanation of the science. But nobody read the explanations; everyone was too busy playing with the exhibits. It's just like real life: everyone is so busy messing around with it that they never sit back and think about the underlying principles." That's when Terry fairly exploded. "You used to be so much fun. Now everything to you is something to be figured out. I work hard all day. When I get home I want to relax, be entertained, catch a movie. What do you think you're doing? Just what have you found in your books and monastery visits?" What could I tell her? When Howard Carter first broke the seal on King Tut's tomb, the people crowded behind him asked: "What do you see, what do you see?" Hushed and in awe he replied, "I see wonderful things." I wanted to tell Terri that I had seen wonderful things. That I had found magic and a magical way to live. That I had known the terror of plummeting a thousand floors in a runaway elevator and the relief of landing in a bed of clouds. I wanted to tell her that I now believed that a man might look upon the face of God and live. But I had no words that could convey the meaning behind these statements. The chasm between us had grown too great. On Sunday Terri drove me to the airport. I expected her to drop me by the entrance and go straight home, but I was pleasantly surprised when she parked the car, walked me to my gate, and waited for a last smile and wave as I boarded the plane. I was sad. We really do like each other, but I doubt we'll ever see each other again. Besides an exchange of thank-you cards, I've not heard from Terri since I got back. But I spent days wondering how, if given another chance, I might have reached her with what is most important to my life. Her questions are so important. They are questions I've struggled with all my life. And as the Self-Knowledge Symposium grows and draws attention to itself, the questions become more urgent. Like Terri, everyone wants a simple explanation. My father wants to know what it is that is worth devoting my whole life to. A reporter from the News and Observer spent two months looking for a clever sound bite that summarized the "SKS mission." But it’s like describing King Tut’s tomb as "a whole lot of gold stuff." And then came a request to contribute to this, the first edition of the SKS newsletter. As always, I felt the overwhelming impossibility of summarizing what this group is all about. Why do we bother meeting and writing and working together? What's in it for them, what's in it for me? And then I read the contributions submitted by some of the students. In most superficial respects, these students have much less in common with me than Terri does: they are half my age, they go to class while I go to work, all their experiences and their plans are completely different from mine. But their concerns and their dreams and their priorities are the same. They want to touch the face of God, to see wonderful things, to climb up that same mountain that looms above me-- together. Reading their stories, I knew I had my answer. There may not be a clever sentence that sums up the SKS, but each of their stories represents one more aspect of the spiritual search, one more "wonderful thing" that we have seen.
The Titanic(top) Georg Buehler UNC Chair "It has been a privilege . . . " When I went to see "Titanic" in Boston, my expectations were low. I had heard what many reviewers had said: the dialog was bad, it was a special-effects movie dressed up like a costume drama, it was, in one reviewer's words, "the only film you'd swear was written and directed by Karl Marx." And yes, that was all true. Yet the movie surprised me . . . it moved me in ways I did not expect, and with the most simple of scenes. There is one scene, towards the end of the film, when the ship is obviously sinking and all the crowds of passengers are standing on the deck in disbelieving panic. The musicians, the string quartet that played to the wealthy passengers in the banquet hall, are called out on the deck and ordered to play, to calm the passengers. (It's a bit of the story that I had heard before, maybe the one everyone knows about the Titanic story - ah, yes, I remember that they played while the ship went down). And they played calm and measured strains, soothing the way only classic strings can soothe. Perhaps it might work . . . we have heard them playing before, in many banquet scenes, always in the background . . . perhaps all is not lost. After a while, though, the contrast is too great; no amount of music can change the fact, dawning on everyone, that they are about to die in the cold, black sea. One of the players says, "It's no good, nobody's listening to us." The leader says, with clarity and honesty, "They never listened to us before, either. But come, let's play . . . " And they strike up another number. The contrast is so stark -- this beautiful music lilting over mobs of terrified men and women. After a while one end of the ship is already underwater, and the musicians conclude a piece and the leader says, "Well, that's it. Good luck." No doubt he wants his friends to make it to the boats on time, he ought to send them off now before it’s too late. They shake hands, and most of the musicians turn to go, to find a place in the lifeboats. But they hadn't gone but a few steps when the leader turns back to his violin, and begins to play. There's something in that music that transfixes them; they can't leave. One by one they come back to where the leader stands, and begin to play with him once again. Here these men are, like everyone else, faced with death and with fear. The greatest ship in the world is sinking beneath them, they know they are facing near-certain death . . . and the only thing that seems worth doing is to play. . . to give that beauty in them expression one last time. They play one last time, "Nearer, My God, to Thee". The water is now swirling up the deck to their ankles . . . there is no doubt, this time, that this is the end of the music. And in the stillness after the last note, the leader says, "Gentlemen . . . it has been a privilege to play with you tonight." That scene moved me like no other, because that scene is Life . . . all of Life, all right there. We are all sinking on our own personal Titanics. Our deaths are just as certain as theirs. We also will stand confused and terrified as our lives (our whole worlds) descend into blackness to be lost forever. And yet there are a few souls who play on, who keep playing in the face of mortality, who give themselves to that transcendent beauty, even to the end. And it’s not just Life in general I see in that seen, but my life. That’s exactly how I feel about my work with the SKS. I put so much of my time and energy in, and it’s so hard. . . the whole world is in chaos around us, I give myself to putting out that important message: that there is something that transcends us, something more important than our own small lives. Most of the time it seems no one is listening. And yet all I can do is play on, play because there is nothing else worth doing. And my friends, my true friends, hear the same Voice in that music that I hear, something bigger than themselves, more beautiful and more important, and they play on with me. There is nothing more important. There are no greater loves, than the love I have for those who love the same music. So that, in end, when the whole world is underwater and lost in blackness, when everything beautiful and alive is irreparably lost, when my life comes to an end, I will look to friends in the Self Knowledge Symposium while the last note hangs in the air and say, "Gentlemen . . . it has been a privilege to play with you tonight."
Our Vain Cathedrals(top) Rachel Medlock Associate Editor of The Symposium Now it is officially Wednesday night. I am sitting in front of this computer typing with my right hand, eating cold, stale pizza (at least three days old) with my left. When I finish writing this, I'll read cultural anthropology for two or three hours and fall asleep, probably on my wondrous RA Standard Issue Sofa. None of this appeals to me. I'd much rather be back where I was two hours ago, sitting beneath a tree in the middle of a field on East Campus, surrounded by my friends Molly, Diana, Laurie, and Kristin. The whole time we were there, I kept thinking, "The Buddha got enlightened under a tree. He was just sitting there, and...wham. There it was--God." Then, like a run-on sentence, Mother Theresa started chanting in my head: "I am a vessel of God I am a vessel of God I am a vessel of God I am a vessel of God" Molly punctuated it all. "Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?" she asked. "'Jesus wept.'" As if reading my mind, Kristin repeated something Laurie had said earlier: "'Be still and know that I am God.'" Be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am God. Be… still… and know… that I am… God. During the hour or so that we sat quietly under the tree, I tried to listen to the Tones. It's hard to explain what a "tone" is to me. It's part of that deeply internal, pre-verbal experience that can never be encapsulated in words. I think of it as a layer of hums. The most discordant hum came from Main Street; lights changing boom of the bass voices of walkers runners laughing motorcycle. Under that level there were the five of us, speaking softly slowly reciting our Hail Marys. But then, beneath us, there were the trees. They were humming even slower, even more quietly. Underlying everything was the sky. The sky was wisest of all, because it was utterly silent. It's willing to wait for us. It's patiently waiting for us to leave our vain cathedrals and look up at it. I have a few lines of poetry that occurred to me on the bus two nights ago riding back from West: Moon, how many men Have you watched imitating gods, Imitating men imitating gods? Eventually we left our space under the tree, walked Molly back to her apartment, and went back inside our vain cathedrals. Now the feeling has faded, but for a moment tonight, I had been still and known God. Return to top of this issue |