In Summary: * Two things that I'm particularly happy about today: 1.) ordered the wife's Christmas and birthday gifts and cards. (Her birthday is Dec. 31, so I usually order her stuff at the same time.) and 2.) found an early men's basketball game to follow, so I'll be able to finish the game and still ease my way into a sensible senior bedtime.

Prayers, etc.: * My daily prayers

Health Metrics: * bw= 223.66 lbs. * bp= 154/89 (63)

Exercise: * kegel pelvic floor exercise, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana, 1 blueberry muffin, toast & butter * 10:00 – baked salmon w. mushroom sauce * 16:30 – 1 more blueberry muffin

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:45 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:00 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 16:00 – listening to The Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – listening to The Joe Pags Show * 18:00 – tuned into the radio call of an NCAA men's basketball game, Toledo Rockets vs. Michigan St. Spartans, late in the 1st half. * 19:30 – MSU wins 92 to 69. Time now to turn off the radio, put on some relaxing music, and quietly read before bed.

Chess: * 11:15 – moved in all pending CC games

I’ve met a lot of interesting people during my travels

I’ve even been to England, I saw some tourists there, whereas I was there for business

Once in Germany I even drank beer from a giant glass shoe, maybe one litre, just like Cinderella.

I’ve been to America too, but I don’t recommend.

I didn’t know what ”smog” was before. Still not sure.

Actually, I don’t like travelling unless it’s to Norway.

But on all of these places, shines the same moon

And in Canada once, I ate poutine

That was remarkable.

And there was a giant waterslide, which I saw in a mall.

It was winter there. In Canada (although in the mall it’s all the same)

It doesn’t matter

I have been a few times to Paris

The french are role models

There were poor beggars eating cucumbers from glass jars in the park outside the Eiffel Tower

In Italy there were bad memories of a broken family, my father got blisters on his feet.

Long ago.

I like Greece more than italy

I felt like Theseus once when we were at Rhodos, but the minotaur was long gone.

It’s the same sky there

There are corpses in the Mediterranean Sea

In Finland they frequently drink beer for lunch, or I did anyway

I found myself welling up with tears before my Buddha statue.

“How are you here? How is the Buddha-nature here? I’m not doubting that it is. I’m asking how? Because this is awful.”

As I’ve talked about before, I’ve been spending the last several months in very dark moods. I’m definitely better than I used to be, but it’s still been about four months since I left the upper-end of depression for longer than a single day. This has given me time to see what the dark moods have to teach me, because they certainly aren’t going anywhere with any haste. Why fight it when it can deepen my understanding of what it means to be human?

This has landed me in a kind of pessimistic liberal theism. Of sorts. Like many Westerners with multiple religious identities including Buddhism, it gets a little murky in places. Nevertheless, a picture has begun to form, drawing from four sources: Søren Kierkegaard, Alfred Whitehead, Walter Benjamin, and Mahayana Buddhism (inflected by Zen and Arthur Schopenhauer).

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Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard felt that existing as a human was a pretty rough deal. He was a very sad boy and felt overwhelming depression and anxiety his whole life. He even broke off his marriage because he felt that she didn’t deserve to deal with his moods (although, maybe that was ultimately the correct call, as his fiancé was 14; a right answer with the wrong equation). But he spent his time engaging with these moods in a deep way, and came away with a pretty remarkable account of the role of anxiety and despair.

For Kierkegaard, anxiety is a response to the freedom that humans have. We can make meaningful choices that shape our lives. And we don’t have assurance that it’ll work out in the end. That’s scary. I sometimes present anxiety as the general knowledge that even if you do everything right, things can still turn out wrong, which I think Kierkegaard would empathize with. However you slice it, a critical part of Kierkegaard’s position is that anxiety isn’t pathological per se, but rather comes from a confrontation with our base reality as humans. It can be a sign of health, or of moving in a healthy direction.

Something similar happens with despair. Per Kierkegaard, most people are in a state of despair, even if they don’t realize it. That’s because being a human is impossible. We are stuck between who we are—our history, our social circumstances, our habits—and who we are becoming, and we are always becoming and often yearning to become something else. That’s not a stable arrangement. It’s so easy, natural even, to cling to our current state and despair that we are forced to change, or to embrace change and despair that we cannot change certain things about ourselves. According to Kierkegaard, all humans at some point are one or the other, perhaps even shifting between the two. But without an existential anchor to stabilize this process between being and becoming, we are stuck in despair. Kierkegaard thought this existential anchor was the Christian God. As someone who is not a Christian, at least not in any way that would be widely recognizable as such to Christians, I’m inclined to look elsewhere.

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Being and Becoming in Whitehead

Whitehead had an interesting take on reality and God. He, like Kierkegaard, thought that we are both being and becoming. He thought all things were being and becoming, actually. That includes God.

Whitehead influenced a lot of liberal theologians with his process thought. He articulated a God that was compassionate—literally, suffering with others, experiencing all that happens directly—and drawing reality to a higher good. He saw a God that held a memory of the universe, grounding the past, experienced the present with all of creation, and non-coercively drew reality towards a more intense future, a “harmony of opposites” where conflicts are not resolved per se but do come to exist in a way that drives things towards aesthetic greatness.

This is an optimistic theology. Whitehead was inclined to think that things get better because the structure of the universe was tilted towards improvement, with God pulling it non-coercively towards an aesthetic greater good.

But if Kierkegaard is right, it’s unclear to me why God would not feel despair either. God cannot fix the past. Maybe God hopes to integrate a disastrous past into a greater harmony of opposites and in that way redeem it. But God can’t do that reliably. Not without the cooperation of the rest of the universe, which is shot through with freedom. There is no promise that the past will ever be redeemed, and it certainly seems that in the arc of human history there is much left to be redeemed, and more happening all the time. From the human angle, there are many things that are irredeemable, generating despair. If God experiences our despair about this as well, then it would seem that God too is unable to resolve the tension between the poles of being and becoming.

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Benjamin’s Angel of History

Walter Benjamin wrote about this human perspective in a divine register. His story about the Angel of History has been one of my touchstones for the last decade, and I can only see Whitehead’s God in it.

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

(Courtesy of marxists.org)

God is the repository of history, the eternal memory, and presently experiencing the suffering of all of creation. And per Benjamin, we are experiencing suffering in a particularly salient way: We have perpetually experienced eternal defeat in the form of being forgotten. Whitehead might feel that God’s eternal memory alleviates this, but we do not experience it. God experiences our despair, and the despair itself taints God’s memory, and God wishes it would not, that it be redeemed into a harmony of opposites, but is forever limited by experiencing the facts of reality, which are that we are trapped.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule.

Indeed, Benjamin entirely rejects our ability to access an eternal and complete memory, and for good reason. That is simply not how we experience time. We experience time with salience, with some things more citable than others. We experience time emotionally and dripping with value. We can only imagine that God is the same way.

It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

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The Okay Suffering of the Buddha

Buddhism has a weird public image. “The end of suffering,” it proclaims. Perhaps more clear and honest is the saying “pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional.” Even more honest: “You still suffer, but it’s okay now.” “No end to suffering,” as the Heart Sutra teaches. (I understand the context provides nuance; just stay with me here.)

That’s the perspective of Zen Buddhism, particularly of the tradition I’ve had the most engagement with, Ordinary Mind. It’s also aligned somewhat with the interpretation of reality that Arthur Schopenhauer walked away with. According to Schopenhauer, reality is fundamentally unsatisfying. The Buddha would probably agree, with all the caveats and nuances and paradoxes the Buddha always offers. But let’s stay with what we can learn here. Reality is fundamentally unsatisfying, but we can’t escape reality. It’s a pretty bleak situation.

What can we do? Schopenhauer said that we should simply withdraw and engage with reality as little as possible. I’m not sure that’s right. I’d break from Schopenhauer here and follow Ordinary Mind in saying that by coming to reality and letting it teach us, as I have with my dark moods, as Kierkegaard did, it becomes a little more okay. In therapy I’ve heard this referred to as clean pain and dirty pain. There’s the clean pain of reality, and the dirty pain we heap on it. We can at least reduce our suffering by wiping away the dirty pain and leave ourselves with the clean pain by seeing reality as it is, without the delusions we tend to experience.

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Hope, Regardless

This is an awful tragic view of reality. It’s a tragic view of God, because it means that God is always suffering, and perhaps in perpetually intensifying ways, depending on if you try to save the progression of harmony of opposites and how you understand “aesthetic” here. It means that we can try to stabilize ourselves and end our despair by anchoring ourselves to God, but if we truly do that then we’d be introduced to the despair of others through God’s universal compassion. Mahayana teaches that we’re here to be compassionate to the despair of others and to alleviate it. Perhaps a pessimistic variant of Mahayana Buddhism would say that we can never fully escape suffering, but we can reduce it by caring about others.

Hope is usually understood as forward-looking. It says that in the future, things will be better, or that there’s something in the future to hold on to. I’m not a fan of the latter because it seems like denying parts of reality, and I’m not an optimist about the future, so I don’t like the former either.

But if reality isn’t doing any work for us—if the universe is fundamentally orthogonal to our happiness, if not hostile to it—that means that if we give a damn, we better roll up our sleeves and build it ourselves. It means that there is an imperative to reduce suffering. It means that we find hope not in the future, but right now, in the actions we do to make suffering a little less. It saves us from the idolatry of the future, as pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran says, and frees us to find hope in the reality in front of us, in compassion and care.

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Dark Moods, Dark Theology

I had to pass through pretty hopeless times to find a seed of hope again. I might never have if I hadn’t let myself sit and engage with my dark moods. I tried to return to the optimism so popular in contemporary culture, and so prevalent in liberal theology, but I couldn’t experience it as anything other than a lie.

I found hope again. Not in the creative advance of Whitehead, or the existential anchor of Kierkegaard, or the belief in the fundamental goodness of people so common in Unitarian Universalism (one of my faith traditions). I found hope in pessimism. I found compassion in universal suffering. I found a way forward with my faith by understanding my faith as flexible enough to accommodate the suffering that humans experience. Instead of seeing my depression as purely pathological, I let myself understand it as a thing that happens to humans, and as I believe that all things that happen to humans are able to be analyzed under a religious lens, I found religion in depression.

I doubt I’m alone. Like I said, depression happens to people, including religious people. I hope that I can share my pessimistic faith with others and save them from the oppression of mandatory optimism. For now, I return to the compassion of the Buddha, and find it makes my suffering a little more okay.