Beyond the mundane?

Most of the time (the times when I’m not fretting), I’m happily embedded in the mundane. I set the table, enjoying the tulips in a vase and the way they pick up the colors in the place mats and the posters on the walls. Then I walk back into the kitchen to see my husband chopping vegetables while he hums along to mellow jazz, and affection floods my heart. Or I walk with a friend along a pretty woodland path on a breezy, sunny day in spring, and she says something that cracks me up. Or I crawl into bed with a good novel waiting on the nightstand and the lamp shedding a soft, warm glow around the room. Or . . . .

When we can get ourselves to slow down and notice, most of us enjoy such moments of happy satisfaction. If our lives are like houses we build and inhabit, we need to ground them securely on a foundation composed of genuine love, deep affection, good work, and earned self-respect. But houses need windows, too, and moments of pleasure fill our lives with light and air. These satisfactions and pleasures are enough for a lot of people. It’s almost enough for me. Almost, but not quite. I’m the type that also yearns to send love soaring upwards, or outwards – beyond the mundane.

It’s a Romantic, or Neo-Platonic, impulse within my personality. After a lifetime of experience, I’ve come to see it both a gift and a curse.  

The gift is moments of ecstasy. I’m susceptible to the slant of golden light in the early morning or just at sunset, to the hush of a forest path broken by the song of a warbler, to a long view out over hills or water. These sometimes produce more than aesthetic pleasure in a nice view or gratitude that the world can be beautiful and ordered (though I feel both those things, too). They provide an exultation and exaltation, a sudden sense of wholeness and holiness. To experience such moments requires silence and solitude, or the company of someone so trustworthy that I can stand quietly and let the experience unfold. Something shy inside of me emerges in such moments. Some part of me feeds on them. I need them as much as I need vitamins and minerals in my diet.

Love produces it, too. A sudden lightning bolt of infatuation can make almost anyone feel dazed and bedazzled, as the walls around the ego briefly collapse. We feel connected to another person in an astonishingly complete way, as though we are not ourselves without them. We don’t just love; we adore. It’s beautiful and exquisitely painful. It makes us blind to ordinary things; it also invests ordinary things with a glow. (It fades, as we all learn. Luckily, it also recurs periodically in good and happy marriages.) The birth of a child or grandchild, too, can produce that sense of overwhelming joy and significance. For a moment, the universe feels perfect.

Ecstasy comes from Greek words that mean to stand outside the self, and of course it’s not just nature or love that produce it. Some people experience it through drugs, dancing to certain kinds of music, creative flow, or sexual passion. Socrates talked about his love for philosophy as ecstatic. Mystics speak of the love of the soul for God in the same terms. (I tried to feel it for God when I younger. I never succeeded.) Just as the ecstasy I sometimes feel in nature is more than aesthetic pleasure, these ecstasies are more than the feelings of belonging or pleasure. They are sharp, sudden, and aching. They feel important. They can leave us in tears, feeling re-shaped and transformed – though in reality the feelings tend to evaporate, often quite quickly. And the need to repeat ecstasies again and again can lead us into dangerous places. (The opioid crisis testifies to that, as do the many short marriages of movie stars. If you need a literary illustration of it, consult any of Donna Tartt’s novels.)

So the yearning to direct one’s upwards or outwards, to elevate something outside the self above the self – what we might name with the old-fashioned words of adoration or worship — is not just a gift. It can be a danger, a burden, and a curse.

We can probably worship the right things badly, but the bigger danger is that we will simply worship the wrong things. Because it’s hard to love things abstract and invisible, we substitute their visible representatives. Love of democracy slides into worship of the flag, the nation, or the President. Love of freedom slides into worship of armies and guns. Love of God slides into worship of a church, a doctrine, a minister, or even the Bible (which always means, in practice, a particular tradition’s interpretation of it). We can respect those things. Some of us can love them. We shouldn’t worship them.

But it’s easy to slip into. I remember a conversation with my father-in-law several years ago. Most of the time he was a reserved, thoughtful, responsible man, a retired CFO who loved his son and was gracious to me. But one afternoon when we were visiting, he had been reading about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and it had touched a nerve. He railed against the protest, my husband responded with something mild about hedge-fund managers and homeless people, and my father-in-law went ballistic. After about ten minutes of listening to a loud, angry monologue, I excused myself for a trip to the restroom. With the door closed and locked, I could calm down. I realized that, for my father-in-law, capitalism couldn’t be questioned. It couldn’t be critiqued, restrained, or balanced against other values. The economic system that was, in my view, an astonishingly successful tool for creating wealth (and was not, to my eye, equally successful at distributing the money in a just or humane way) had been elevated into a religion.

I’ve done it, too – repeatedly. Once, in a key moment with my excellent therapist. I was talking about a pattern I was beginning to see about myself, a tendency to place other people as judges and juries over me. I learned to do it in relation to my mother. (Not entirely her fault. I was dangerously ill for years, completely dependent on her care. And she was not a naturally patient person.) The same tendency had ruined my first marriage. (I expected myself to adore him. He expected to be adored. Not workable.). And now it was poisoning my life as a junior faculty member at a good liberal arts college. Every time I wrote a sentence of my book for tenure, my mind supplied the image of a colleague raising a scornful eyebrow – a perfect recipe for writing block. My therapist hesitated. “I wouldn’t use this language with other clients,” she said slowly. “But maybe you could think of it as a form of idolatry.” My first reaction was, Whaaaat?!?!?!? After a while, though, I wrapped my mind around what she meant – that, although I consciously saw my colleagues’ faults, I was unconsciously elevating them to a god-like position over me. I was in essence bowing down before their judgments. In the process, I was making myself small and silent (with occasional rebellions).

Worship can feel like an archaic hold-over from pre-scientific periods of human history. And there are psychological ways of understanding this impulse to put people up on pedestals. Our poor, scared, little egos need to feel safe, and we hope that attaching ourselves to a benevolent god or king can protect us. Or we elevate the wealthy and famous – aristocrats in the old days, movie stars now – hoping their charisma will fall on us like fairy dust and make us worthy of notice. Those impulses to bow down before the Wise Old King or the Unattainable Female Beauty are probably connected to my experiences with nature and love, but I don’t think they’re the same. They certainly feel different to me. I’m not interested in letting anyone’s judgments of my life and thoughts overshadow my own ever again. But I’d hate to lose that rare but profound ecstasy – so full of awe and amazement – of belonging to a universe that’s beautifully alive.

In the years post-therapy, I’ve been trying to disentangle these ways of loving upwards. It’s a long project, intellectually and emotionally, and I’ve  gotten only a little ways down the path.  Let me know your thoughts!