Rolheiser - The Holy Longing

If you follow my blog, you know that I read and devour experiences for new insights which results in my posts being all over the place. This summary of Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing (2014) was read by a book group in my church and I became curious about it when several people commented on its relevance to today's world and the struggle for meaning that many people express. The book is coming from a religious perspective but I see many of the ideas that are advocated as more broadly applicable to general spirituality and yearning for purpose in living.

The primary thesis of The Holy Longing is that humans by nature are drawn to search for meaning - the existential question of what's this all about and what is my purpose here? Rolheiser offers the opinion, "Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for people of a particular bent... We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality" (p. 6). He goes on to suggest that what counts in this innate spirituality is what we do with it - the habits and discipline with which we choose to live that either brings us closer together with others and nature itself or drives us apart. In a surprising twist for a book coming from a religiously-based author, he identified Mother Theresa, Janis Joplin, and Princess Diane as examples of different ways to seek connections to the ultimate - women whose lives were shaped by deep energy and zest for life who, without pursuing their passions, would have fallen apart or died.

Turning to a more practical application, Rolheiser referenced naivete about spiritual energy, pathological busyness, distraction, restlessness, and a lack of balance as essential impediments to the search for meaning. These distractions of the modern day drive us from each other, from community, and away from the healing that faith communities can foster. What then is the antidote? Referencing C.S. Lewis from Surprised by Joy, he says that "delight has to catch us unaware, a place where we are not rationalizing that we are happy" (p. 26). Those surprising moments are quite simply when we say to ourselves, "God, it feels great to be alive" (p. 26).

I've had these "it's great to be alive" moments and I cherish them, and the interesting thing is that I experience them more in my senior days than earlier in life. Perhaps the result of constantly seeking as young or maturing adults, we just don't see that where we are justifies pausing for the moment of appreciation and celebration. Rolheiser suggested that growing in our "it's great to be alive" could be cultivated more by observing the New Testament teaching of Jesus. Specifically, four practices or attitudes are ways to seek spiritual connectedness as well as recognize it. They include; 1) private prayer and morality, 2) social justice, 3) mellowness of heart and spirit, and 4) community.

I've believed for some time that "conviction in action" was one of the central, if not a primary core, element to inspired leadership. The holy longing described by Rolheiser, and the four practices, may be another way of characterizing and pursuing the discovery and pursuit of purpose that I've previously advocated.

Irwin - The Alhambra

A great complement to Ornament of the World, Robert Irwin's The Alhambra (2004, 2005) delves into the history, mystery, and extraordinary artistry of one of the most significant buildings in the world. Built in the 14th century (1334-91) in the latter days of the Nasrid caliphs, the Alhambra has come to be recognized as the quintessential example of Moorish art and architecture, although the height of the Moors in Spain was during the much earlier period of the 8th to the 10th centuries. Irwin's book is actually a travel guide and is probably read by tourists preparing for a visit, but it has enough historical depth to make reading it worthwhile whether touring or simply wanting to know more about Moorish architecture.

The Alhambra offers perspective on ambition, decline, and remorse about what could have been. In Irwin's final pages of text he bemoans, "The Alhambra serves as an icon of exile and loss" (locator 2022). The early presence of Moors in Spain brought religious tolerance, prosperity, and stimulated art and culture distinctive in Europe but in its final years all this would vanish, all but the Alhambra.

The Alhambra palace (actually 6 palaces) is sectioned into three areas; the Mexuar for public business, the Court of the Myrtles for private administrative use, and the Court of the Lions which included private apartments for the king (Emir) and his concubines. The uses of the palaces, barracks, mosque, and small town are sometimes disputed, and the reality is that it's impossible to determine the historic use of some areas in the palace. By contrast to many historic buildings that were erected to assert authority and power, the Alhambra was more scaled to the private use and comforts of Nasrids. But historic events did take place there, including a visit by Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella years after Christians defeated the Moors. Columbus, with his Jewish Arabic-speaking interpreter by his side, appealed for resources to sail to the east by going west on his 1492 expedition. Why an Arabic-speaking Jew? Because Columbus assumed that those he would encounter in the east would speak Arabic. The preservation, and subsequent renovation, of the Alhambra was as much a victory statement of Reconquista as it was a commitment to great architecture.

The phrase 'La Ghalib ila Allah' ('No victor but God') is found throughout the Alhambra, displayed in fabrics as well as incorporated into the permanent decoration of walls. The pleasures of life, a veritable heaven on earth, are reflected in arresting vistas, proportion of buildings and arches, landscape, and pools and fountains. The hammams (baths) in the Alhambra are both beautiful and functional, allowing for ablution in preparation for prayer as well as for cleanliness. The Hall of the Ambassadors is the most impressive room, clearly intended as a chamber for reception of visitors, and is sheltered by a ceiling of twelve-sided stars in seven levels, reflecting the seven heavens. The Court of the Lions is a sunken garden of low plants (or "Riyad") and is considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. This garden and others served as extensions of the buildings, with the buildings simply framing the beauty of the gardens, which might have served as meditative spaces for Muslims to study and pray (madrassa). All the Alhambra buildings reflect a harmony of space that suggests the infusion of mathematical principles in design, although no evidence confirms such a scientific approach.

Music was also an important element of the Alhambra, with music itself being highly mathematical and proportional. The 'ud, an instrument popular today throughout the middle east with Marcel Khalifa its undisputed contemporary master, is proportioned to match the relationship of the spheres. Ibn Khaldun declared that the meaning of music "is that existence is shared by all existent things" (locator 1219) and that vocal music reflected the apex of cultural development. The predictable mathematical relationship in music are reminiscent of the symmetrical tessellation found in abstract decorations in textiles, carpets, tiles, and other adornments, with arabesques depicting leaf and tendrils and atauriques depicting vegetation such as palmette, pinecone, and palm leaves.

The perspective of the Moors, and the Alhambra their personification, for some Spaniards is that the Moors undermined their unique cultural identity. For Arabs and Muslims, the Alhambra stands for all that has been lost in the centuries after the decline of the Moors in Spain, the Ottomans in the Middle East, and persecution in far eastern places such as India. I've come to understand this through Marcel Khalifa's sculpted portrayal in the music of "Concerto al Andalus" and in the mournful playing and singing that I previously thought was Spanish but now recognize as a blend of Spanish and Muslim/Arab cultures.

Menocal - Ornament of the World

In the closing chapter of Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002), author Maria Rosa Menocal commented, "Andalusian stories allow us to glimpse one long and extraordinary chapter of our history in which the three major monotheistic faiths struggled, successfully and unsuccessfully, with the question of tolerance of one another" (epilogue). Indeed, the middle of the 8th century until approximately 300 years later was a brilliant moment in time when Jews, Christians, and Muslims mingled faith with art of various sorts and created a degree of shared prosperity that was unusual for the time and even today.

Committed to asserting control of the "House of Islam," the Abbasids murdered all but one of the Umayyad ruling family in Damascus in the year 750. The lone survivor, Abd al-Rahman, fled Syria, traveling through northern Africa, and landing in southern Spain. Exiled from his home and all that he knew, al-Rahman assembled loyalists to Islam and took Cordoba by force in 756. He then rapidly transformed Cordoba into a flourishing economy with diverse cultures and religions, embracing and benefiting all. By the 10th century, following a succession of the al-Rahman heirs, Cordoba was recognized as "the ornament of the world," from which the title of Menocal's book is taken.

The Umayyad view of Islam embraced the dhimmi, believers in one God and adherents of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prophetic teaching. The view mandated the protection of Jews and Christians, even though conversion to Islam was also seen as possible and desirable. In fact, the term "Mozarab" was adopted as the term for converts who embraced Islam and Arab ways of living. The Mozarab dressed like Arabs and even adopted Arabic as their language, joining in the polity of "people of the book." The Umayyad were committed to transmitting essential knowledge from generation to generation and did so by translating essential historical texts and amassing impressive libraries. Jews were employed as viziers and intellectuals, creating greater prosperity than Jews in Europe had ever achieved, largely because they embraced their Umayyad sponsors and enthusiastically embraced cultural assimilation and Arabization.

Some of the internal chapters of Ornament of the World are primarily focused on literature and poetry. In these chapters, Menocal described the fluidity and fusion of languages across cultural groups with Jews and Christians speaking and writing in Arabic or dialects combining their cultural languages with Arabic and Spanish. One of the most profound examples of this fusion was for Jews whose native language expanded to transcend its previous use in religious observance, giving rise to a new period of literary and poetic expression in Hebrew.

Even after the height of Islamic influence in Spain, Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun's prolific writing in mid-14th century was heavily influenced by the legacy of al-Andalus. Fleeing politically stifling Fez (Morocco), Ibn Khaldun first settled in Granada and then Seville, immediately recognized as a renowned scholar in both. His Maqaddimah, or "Introduction to History," contributed to a new view of history that recorded the rise, decline, and fall of great societies, a pattern that was so evident in al-Andalus. As an example, he would have seen that even the architecture of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, built on the foundation of the former Great Mosque of Seville, was adorned with Arabic language and profuse arabesques. Observing the influence of Islamic and Arab culture must have seemed ironic as well as tragic, something historians now view as cultural appropriation of a past great Islamic society overcome by Christian domination. This domination eventually led to the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, when Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or leave the place where they had previously tolerated each others' religions as they contributed to a golden age of knowledge and art.

Menocal lauded Cervantes' story of Don Quixote, first published in 1605 but based on stories from the golden age of al-Andalus, as a masterpiece reflecting the tragedy of cultural decline. Book burning and vilification of others were symbolized in the windmills of Don Quixote's mind, depicting a time when reality could no longer be discerned from the conflagration of disinformation. The story of Man of la Mancha reflected the loss of an age of possibility with the Alhambra in Granada as its iconic representation, a palace so splendid, so unique in its "Stylistic openness, the capacity to look around, assimilate, and reshape promiscuously,... as a key part of the Umayyad aesthetic" (locator 3883).

Why did this golden age of tolerance and creativity end so quickly? One explanation that historians have opined is that the Black Death (bubonic plague) of the Middle Ages, killing 20% of the total population, drove cultural and religious groups away from each other. Driven by fear, and the crumbling infrastructure of social mores and shared humanity, groups that had found common cause disintegrated into warring factions. Scapegoating of the "other" was central to destroying the bond of humanity and tolerance itself was characterized as traitorous. What remained after the Black Death was a hollowed-out system void of religious tolerance and compassion. Whether the result of the Black Death or a slide toward Christian orthodoxy and accompanying persecution of other faiths, Spain in the post-Moor era failed to accept the more difficult  path of cultivating the uneasy embrace of contradiction and difference. In essence, the Spanish Inquisition became the instrument of purifying a culture from 500 years of nurturing tolerance and co-existence.

The question lingering in my mind is if Ibn Khaldun's depiction of decline and fall of great societies is underway in the present day? And the pivotal leadership question is if leaders will take the creative path of fostering tolerance across difference or will they choose the easier, and profoundly destructive, path of denying diverse human experience and culture in the pursuit of cultural purification and domination?

Being present

One of the most important elements of leadership is presence - personifying a purpose and relating it to others. If we let our emotional intelligence judge for us, it's actually something that is relatively easy to discern. Look at anyone who aspires to or is engaged in leadership and ask yourself, "Is what I'm observing authentic and compelling?"

David Marchese, a writer for the NY Times, asked the famous musician and humanitarian, Yo-Yo Ma, about how he thought about the settings where he plays. His response is instructive for any form of engagement with others, and especially for those who seek to offer leadership.

As a performer, my job is to make the listener the most important person in the room. The only way to avoid burnout is to care about where you are. Being present. Caring. You're working with living material. That goes back to memory. The living material is only living if it is memorable. Not only that it's memorable but that you pass it on. That is what I'm thinking about with every single interaction. Whether it's a kid, someone on the street, in a concert hall or with you, David. It's the same thing: How to be present. Because if you're not?

Rosling - Factfulness

How can I more accurately interpret both mainstream and social media reports that are often biased or outright misrepresentations of truth? I picked up Hans Rosling's Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things are Better Than You Think (2018) with the hope that it might offer perspective that I could use and share with others. While Rosling's assertions are not revelatory, they were useful and offer an opportunity to be more critical interpreting what we read and hear.

When searching for understanding about issues of concern to me, I know to be cautious about social media, checking the origin of information I read and seeking alternative sources to confirm reports that are shared or receive numerous "likes." However, I frequently complain about journalists who do not present fair and unbiased views. Rosling places the responsibility clearly on us, recognizing that journalists or activists for any cause should automatically be assumed to advocate a particular view. If bias is assumed from almost every source, then the only place to turn is critical examination that will improve my ability to sort through hyperbole and disinformation that distracts from real concerns.

Based on deep analyses of a variety of topics, and quizzing/speaking to audiences in various workforce sectors across the world (including the World Economic Forum, World Health Organization, UNICEF, and others), Rosling found that the most common misconceptions about current conditions in the world result from hasty decisions made without critical examination. And these decisions involve ten significant errors of interpretation:

• Gap - dividing everything into distinct and conflicting groups, when most people and situations fall somewhere in the middle of a continuum
• Negativity - tending to notice bad more than good, exacerbated by glorifying the past, selective reporting of the present, and feeling it's cruel to view things as improving
• Straight line - assuming a unidirectional and inevitable path with just one outcome 
• Fear -  attending to the most dramatic and unlikely dangers while ignoring other things that could be riskier
• Size - focusing on immediate problems rather than larger dynamics that could cause more harm
• Generalization - mistakenly grouping people and things together that are fundamentally different
• Destiny - believing that people, countries, religions, or cultures have a predetermined fate
• Singularity - measuring human progress by one, or a few, indicators rather than the complicated intersection of many factors
• Blame - fixing responsibility on a clear or simple reason, exaggerating its importance and neglecting other explanations
• Urgency - jumping to action when danger appears imminent, while it rarely is as immediate or devastating as we envision

Rosling provided lots of examples and proof of how our lives are captured by the interpretation errors above, and he provided tips for how to avoid the mistakes and come to a more factful understanding of the world. Each of the above is influenced by the reality of a world that is divided into roughly four broad divisions of  prosperity, with the U.S.A. and Europe mostly at level 4, the majority of the world in the middle (2 and 3), and a few countries at level 1 - all growing toward level 4. The other influence is that the world has both bad and good things going on; under these circumstances, a "possibilist" perspective rather than either a defeatest or naively optimistic view is warranted.

The achievement that Rosling claimed at the beginning of his book was the most revolutionary of his lifetime is that "Over the past twenty years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved" (p. 6). Indeed, this is such a foundational change that it impacts almost everything else in our world. However, some of the disasters referenced as possible threats in Factfulness are now part of our more disrupted world. First, the COVID 19 pandemic that shut down the world and second, two wars now raging in 2023. On top of these, anti-democratic forces are present in the U.S.A. and around the world that threaten the very foundations of modern life. Acknowledging positive changes in our world, as well as understanding potential threats, requires even greater discipline as we seek factfulness in our daily lives.

Graeber & Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything

What would happen if we examined the emergence of culture from a completely different point of view than most of our history books tell us? What if inequality isn't a natural human condition and, instead, is the result of the imposition of western misinterpretations designed to justify the way of life that "advanced" cultures have adopted? What if reinterpretation of the historical record started with indigenous peoples and not the elites of world culture?

These are questions woven throughout Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). The impact of reading this deep dive into archeological and anthropological research was mind-boggling. I appreciated the level of detail in the interior chapters, although it was sometimes overwhelming. Upon review of the sections I highlighted while reading, I found that Chapters 1, 2, and 12 beautifully captured the core purposes of the entire book, and that was to propose the possibility that history has been shaped in ways to support current political and economic systems, systems that have created inequity, abuse, and violence. Further, Graeber & Wengrow ask the reader to explore the potential that the conditions observed so widely in the contemporary world were not inevitable and that change, even now, is possible.

Chapter 1 began with reflection on the impact of Hobbe's Leviathan, "in many ways the founding text of modern political theory" and its assertion of "humans being the selfish creatures they are... 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'" (p. 2). This original state (reinforced by Torah and Old Testament Bible stories of original sin, and accompanying isolation, competition, deprivation, and war) was envisioned as being correctable through the "Enlightenment" advocated among European philosophers and intellectuals of the 18th century. What's fascinating is that Enlightenment thought related to individual liberty and political equality actually came from early European exposure to Native Americans and their communities, which were unusual in "qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness" (p. 20). While some of the early voyagers to "Turtle Island" characterized Native Americans as "noble savages," others saw that they were freer societies than those of Europe.

Enlightenment thinkers were especially impressed with the discourse, debate, and reason of Kandiaronk of the Wendat tribe during his visit to France. Kandiaronk declared as a result of his visit, "What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?" (p. 53). Kandiaronk also observed that forcing people to behave would be unnecessary but for the presence of "money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest" (p. 54). The French saloniste of the 1750s recognized the conflict between commitments to freedom and equality versus the regime of private property ownership, which brought Rousseau to question how Europeans had turned wealth into domination and power, allowing the winners to tell others what to do, to exploit them, and care so little about their human condition.

Countering the prevailing theorizing about the formation of states, The Dawn of Everything proposed that small communities either existed on their own or broke away from organized despotic abusers and abuses in numerous examples. Now proven untrue, previous cultural anthropologists viewed state formation as an inevitable linear evolution from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states based on advances in technology such as agriculture. Instead of a linear progression, organized communities emerged through a process of what 1930s anthropologist Gregory Bates coined as "schismogenesis," where self-governing communities formed to differentiate themselves from the abuses of classism, monarchy, and militarism. The new understanding of what constituted organized community was most evident in the North American example of the urban center Cahokia, which already existed when Europeans arrived in North America. Cahokia included three elementary freedoms - "to move away, to disobey, and to build new social worlds" (p. 469). This and other Native American examples demonstrated that is is possible to avoid the evolutionists' view of organized states and this view was embraced by Enlightenment thinkers.

The analysis included in The Dawn of Everything showed that the rise of "states" such as Egypt and the Maya depended on confusing the two functions of care and domination. This confusion was central to how humans eventually lost their ability to see another way of living in community as even possible. As the cultures that we commonly view as most significant began forming, charismatic figures created expanded systems of care around themselves (sometimes focusing on preparation for a presumed afterlife), which grew into the ability to dominate through threat of life or livelihood which was enforced either through a systematized administration or military mobilization. These tools of despotic states are not present in examples such as Minoan Crete, where women's influence was much more prominent and equality more common. Relegating these examples to the margins of history, rather than recognizing them as legitimate human aspiration, extinguished them as demonstrations of communities embracing greater equity, caring for each other, and preserving the natural world.

Graeber & Wengrow proposed that by continuing to reduce humanity to simple, barbarian-like depictions, social scientists might actually have impoverished history - "and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility" (p. 21) in the modern day. The evidence was right under our noses, but maybe that's the point. How Native Americans lived was a threat to notions of property ownership, accumulation of wealth, and domination through control of information and threat of life.

Desmond - Poverty, by America

 Matthew Desmond's Poverty, by America (2023) references McGhee's The Sum of Us (2021) and repeats the critique that systemic racism and classism undermine opportunity among oppressed classes. Where McGhee focuses more on how this oppressive classism costs everyone, not just those put down by it, Desmond addresses ways that America created this system and how privileged segments of Americans are served by perpetuating it.

The earlier chapters review why America has not been successful in addressing wealth inequality, including disenfranchisement of workers, poor people paying more for what little they get, and reliance on welfare as a nod to addressing poverty. The later chapters move to ways that America might actually move forward in creating a fairer economy.

Desmond poses the shared dilemma, "We are much richer than citizens of other countries, including other wealthy ones, and we're much richer than our forebearers. And yet, the dominant mood among the American middle and upper classes is one of fret and worry" (p. 103). The complaint of Americans who can be judged by most standards as being comfortable is that they work nonstop. In addition, having worked so hard for their living then translates to expecting products that are readily available and cheap. Herein is the problem, fast and cheap is only possible when supply lines erupt and collapse based on demand and when all the working class can expect is poverty-inducing compensation for their time. Heaped on top of fast and cheap is that as accumulated wealth increases, the wealthy are ever more able to withdraw from reliance on public goods and services. Increases in wealth then result in declining willingness for the wealthy to support and fund public services which leads to deteriorating quality of service - a destructive downward spiral. Whether it's resources outside one's immediate neighborhood like schools or public parks and recreation, or mass transit, it's always a fight to gain support in wealthier enclaves.

How did we get here? Desmond identified the major driver of sustained poverty coming from the biggest tax cut in U.S. history, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 of the Reagan Presidency. Of course, the tax reduction benefit went primarily to wealthier citizens and even the more progressive policies pushed by those in this group tend to "pose no real threat to their affluence" (p. 115). Working class whites see how progressive moves weren't intended to help them and they soon become resentful about elites and the institutions that they support.

How do we get out of this cycle? First, we should cease exploiting working-class citizens. Second, we must stop subsidizing affluence over alleviating poverty. Third, we should stop allowing privileged communities to isolate themselves from the broader world. The things that can make a difference include making sure that low-income Americans can easily access assistance for which they qualify, ensuring that safe and affordable housing is available to all, that all children have a crack at security and success, and driving down the "agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, and despair" (p. 124).

Poverty in America is systemic and begins with tackling tax cheaters, estimated as a loss of $1 trillion annually. Along with plugging tax evasion, policies should be enacted that demonstrate goodwill and avoid stoking suspicion that kindles resentment. A successful and popular policy that resulted in a 50% reduction among those who live in poverty in the 1960s was the Social Security amendment of 1965. This program is constantly threatened by conservatives who label it as social welfare, but most Americans know that they invested in it and deserve to benefit from it. Poverty in America is also personal and each individual can help by adopting "poverty abolitionist" habits of shopping and investing with a commitment to human dignity - and let others know you've chosen to change. The compelling reality is that the U.S. has a lot of economic vitality, in fact it is abundant, and this reality must be asserted to counter those who insist on maintaining focus on competition for scarce resources of various sorts. There is enough to go around if unequal access is addressed!