Iquanas in the garden

We all love to find commonalities and similarities with other people. Just the other day at work I was laughing with a coworker over the fact that we both had problems with wrinkled socks when we were young… we were both referred to as “the princess and the pea” as children… we are both very anal and somewhat obsessive-compulsive… good thing we both work as copy editors! Many conversations seem to turn to similar interests or personality traits. It seems natural and unavoidable. But when all we talk about is “me too!” it might be a problem.

I grew up reading the “Sweet Pickles” book series…they’re great. Each book is about a different character, and each character corresponds with a letter of the alphabet, an animal and a personality trait. So for “I” there’s Imitating Iguana. She does what everyone else does, and doesn’t really have an identity of her own. She always says “me too!” and tries to be like everyone else but ends up looking ridiculous. Supposedly, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but there has to be a limit.

This tendency toward imitation coincides with but also contradicts the desire we each have to be unique and individual. We want to be unlike others; we want to fit in; we want to be validated as different and as similar. So where is the balance? Do we set ourselves up as paragons of uniqueness or perfection? Thomas Merton (yep, another quote from my favorite reading of late… “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”) has some thought-provoking thoughts on this topic:

If I do not have unity in myself, how can I even think, let alone speak, of unity among Christians? Yet, of course, in seeking unity for all Christians, I also attain unity within myself.

The heresy of individualism: thinking oneself a completely self-sufficient unit and asserting this imaginary “unity”’ against all others. The affirmation of the self as simply “not the other.” But when you seek to affirm your unity by denying that you have anything to do with anyone else, by negating everyone else in the universe until you come down to you: what is there left to affirm? Even if there were something to affirm, you would have no breath left with which to affirm it.

The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone.

I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further.

So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot “affirm” and “accept,” but first one must say “yes” where one really can.

If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.

I’m not a Catholic, but I am still able to agree with the heart of Merton’s argument. Self-assured, theologically perfect, “I have all the answers” people are not the easiest ones to get along with. More than that, they tend to lose their “individualism” somewhere in the midst of their narrow-minded attitudes, and make others want to stubbornly retain their opinions if only to be unlike the hypocrites. It’s all too familiar. Instead, we find that unity comes through recognizing differences, not through homogenization. If we try to make others like ourselves, or make ourselves like others, we end up with a mess rather than a paragon.

Here’s a little analogy I’ve stumbled upon… it also explains my entry title, in case you were wondering. Building unity is like gardening: if I see a lot of weeds in my garden and decide to rototill everything in sight, I’m going to have to start all over. But if I really get down in the dirt and look at things closely, realizing what are actually weeds and what are not, then I can begin making progress. However, after assessing the state of my own garden, I can’t walk into others’ gardens and expect them to look just like mine. I have no right to get into others’ gardens and start rototilling what appears to be a garden full of weeds. I must first recognize the flowers and useful plants in their gardens before calling attention to the weeds (though it might be a different story if only weeds are visible). God isn’t into rototillers; God is all about down-on-your-knees, muddy weeding and gentle, hands-on involvement.

Lately it seems that everything I write stems from Thomas Merton, or reminds me of a poem I have written. Life is ever-so-circular. So, speaking of dirt and knees, here we go…

Untitled
3-28-03

What is the point of being an artist
if you never have to go outside?
To get cold fingers and dirty
knees, crouching down to examine
an old leaf. Kneeling
in wet moss, hoping
to watch a bud unfurl its three
petals, which you hope will be
flaming orange---
not pink, please, not merely pink.
So crouch, kneel, spread yourself
over the wet, dirty, mossy, fragrant
earth. And then go back inside
and be an artist, if you can
remember then what you were working on
before the cold fingers
and the new pale buds sprung
from the rich soil.

© 2003 April K Szuch

While searching through my thesaurus for a word or words for titling this poem, I looked up “outside,” and realized that the primary meanings for the word refer not to the outdoors or nature, but to exteriors, the external, away from, apart from, etc. And I realized something about my poem---its meaning goes deeper and connects further to the preceding subject than I realized. If the “inside” in the poem refers to the interior of a person and remaining inside oneself, and the “outside” refers to other people, and extending oneself to reach and connect with them, then my poem makes sense on another level as well. The funny thing about my poetry is that I don’t usually try to understand it or explain it---I just take its initial meaning (the meaning in which I wrote it) for granted as the obvious explanation. But here is something else, and something more meaningful, I think. When I stay inside myself, I stay clean and supposedly artistic, but it is only when I venture outside that I realize how much beauty and inspiration there is in the world and in others. At that point, there is less of an attraction to retreating back inside to my sterile palette of perfection.

Well, this one is long! Thoughts? Disagreement? Different takes on Merton’s thoughts?

Comments

[jer k]

I love "Conjectures!" One of my favourite books from my favourite author...

That "affirming" in others what is true that Merton talks about scares a lot of Christians. Why, I wonder...