Miss Harbottle’s Big Mistake (And Why it Matters to Us)

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The enchanting Masterpiece series All Creatures Great and Small features a crochety but loveable Yorkshire vet, Siegfried, and his brilliant young partner, James. In this series, based on the real-life stories of James Herriot, the two vets have a policy of “putting the animal first,” that is, above profit. Yes, it’s rather scandalous — even in the 1940s — for profit to be put on the backburner in favor of living, breathing animals. But it’s not just cows and goats and dogs that come first. Their compassion for the animals’ owners require the two vets to be flexible on occasion — that is, to accept jam and eggs and the odd chicken as payment when they really need hard cash. But they do it because they not only care for the animals; they also see the fuller picture of community well-being and the need for caring for their neighbors. They live within the creative tension of compassion and making ends meet.

But of course, these beloved characters are imperfect like the rest of us, so sometimes they make the wrong call. Such was the case in Season 4, in which Siegfried, overcome with the tyranny of mounting paperwork and general office chaos, decides to hire Miss Harbottle, an uber efficient secretary, to come in and straighten up things. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right?

Miss Harbottle certainly cleans up and organizes the chaos. But in the process, she begins to take control of everything, telling the doctors what they could and could not do, taking over Siegfried’s own office as her own, and generally alienating everyone with her rigid rules and domineering ways. On her first day, Miss Harbottle takes a disgusting dislike to Siegfried’s beloved pet rat, Volonel, whose cage sits next to his desk, and takes it upon herself to banish Volonel to a dark back room.

This would not stand! Siegfried returns Volonel to his proper place and even tries to muster the courage to fire Miss Harbottle. But alas, his resolve crumbles against her rigid, manipulative dominance.

One day, a man named Joe Coyne brings in his little white ferret, Wilf, who is suffering from a lump on his skin and needs surgery. Miss Harbottle turned him away for not making “a proper appointment” or paying in advance (her new policy). Joe stomped away with his ferret in tow, vowing never to return.

That act proves to be Miss Harbottle’s undoing. Because the “animals first” policy is so brutally disrespected, James and Siegfried conspire to bring Wilf in for surgery after Miss Harbottle leaves for the evening. But alas, the formidable Harbottle returns for the post she had forgotten and encounters this “unauthorized” operation in progress. Livid, she decries, “You went against my authority!” Upon which Siegfried responds, “an authority I should have never relinquished.”

Of course, Miss Harbottle is dismissed on the spot and life returns to its normal creative chaos. An entertaining story, for sure, but it also reminds us of the tensions within human nature and, on a deeper, spiritual level, reveals something of what is wrong with the world even now.

Miss Harbottle as Metaphor

Miss Harbottle is the perfect metaphor for what philosopher, psychiatrist, and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist calls “left-hemisphere dominance.”  His “hemisphere hypothesis” is that the left hemisphere of our divided brain has an important role to play in our lives, but it is a limited one that serves the broader view of the right hemisphere — like a camera zooming in to grasp, isolate, and manipulate (left-hemisphere) and then zooming out to see the larger context (right hemisphere). We need both perspectives in order to survive and thrive. The problem comes when the left hemisphere goes rogue and takes over (i.e., Miss Harbottle). When this happens, we lose perspective and life becomes mechanical, shallow, literal, fragmented, and lifelessly static.

Like Miss Harbottle, the left-hemisphere simply can’t see the whole picture, the broader context, and the relational aspects of existence. It believes it is always right, seeks to control, and gets angry when confronted (anger being the prime emotion of the left-hemisphere).

When we (individuals or whole societies) allow this part of our thinking to be our dominant view of reality, we become rigid and limited in our thinking, cut off from the real world of flesh and blood and feeling, and from the spiritual world that gives meaning and purpose. We are inviting tyranny into our lives.

McGilchrist does not reduce the mind to the physical brain as do scientific materialists, but rather sees the brain’s two hemispheres as a physical home for our consciousness. How we use our brains becomes a moral and spiritual choice. As his decades of research shows, we can open ourselves to meaning, spirituality, and beauty only when our brains are balanced, with the right hemisphere being the master and the left, the helper.

In his massive (and massively important) work The Master and His Emissary, he tells a fable which could easily be Siegfried and Miss Harbottle: a master becomes overcome with too much work to handle and hires an emissary to help. But the emissary begins to take over. In the process, life — human, animal, creation — along with compassion and an intelligent sense of the broader picture is lost in the small and narrow focus of left-hemisphere tyranny. Relations are fractured, rigidity rules, and catastrophe ensues.

Miss Harbottle’s big mistake was not her efficiency and skill, which was sorely needed, but her desire to take over with rigid rules that look good in the abstract, but fail miserably in reality. She failed to see herself as a “helper” and took control over the vet practice, leaving soured feelings and fractured relationships. She couldn’t see the larger context in which she worked — the real world of struggling country folk, suffering animals, and delicate village relationships.

When the left hemisphere overreaches its authority and does not return attention (zoom out) to the larger, living, breathing, interconnected world, bad things happen. Devoid of the right hemisphere’s larger, more intelligent and contextual view of things, farmers and ferrets become mere numbers and abstractions rather than living beings.

The sense of interconnection, flow, and all the values of the spiritual life are lost in the emissary’s grasp for power. Our openness to the Divine and to the higher values of goodness, truth, and beauty — all that makes life meaningful — depends on our choice to return our focus to the master, i.e., the right hemisphere. But how?

A is for Attention

McGilchrist emphasizes that the brain hemispheres attend to the world differently, and that, yes, we have a moral choice in the matter. Like Siegfried, the modern world has relinquished much of its power to the emissary. It appears we are stuck with the tyranny of Miss Harbottle until we have the courage to push back and make moral choices that bring our brain hemispheres into balance, opening us up to the richness and depth of love, beauty, and compassion above the rigid, narrow focus on money, power, and control. It will take a change of viewpoint — of attention — and some soul-searching to rediscover what matters.

Another way of putting it: we need to enlarge our souls for the sake of the world. The right hemisphere’s take on the world is broadening and well-rounded, while the left hemisphere lacks depth, complexity, and flexibility. So perhaps enlarging our attention is the first step to enlarging our souls. After all, “A” is for attention in the “Alphabet of Spirit Literacy.” Perhaps it is first in importance, too, or at least foundational to all the other spiritual values. If we choose to attend to the world of left-hemisphere narrowness, we will be impoverished to the point of putting our very existence in peril. The spiritual part of us needs the right hemisphere’s way of attending: seeing the whole context, the flow, and the relationality of God and the world. None of this makes sense to the rigid, literal, and abstract oriented left-hemisphere.

The Courage to Push Back

The struggle between Miss Harbottle’s narrow approach to the world and Siegfried’s attention to larger issues serves not only as a cautionary tale but an insight into our humanity and what we must regain in order to survive these perilous times. Many of our religious and spiritual values have fallen by the wayside — or been usurped by false prophets. By fattening our souls rather than our wallets, by enlarging our experiences with nature, art, and face-to-face interactions, and by broadening our minds to learn and listen to the views of the “other,” we might just regain our humanity and survive as a species. But it’s going to be an uphill battle. The Miss Harbottles of this world are a formidable lot!

But there is hope. In our story, when things fell apart in the vet practice, Siegfried had the courage to admit he was wrong in relinquishing his authority to Miss Harbottle. He was finally able to push back against the tyranny and return to his foundational values of relationships and compassion over profit and power. Yes, Siegfried had the courage to return his attention to what really matters. The question is: Do we?

Walking in the Air: An Advent Music Meditation

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We’re walking in the air
We’re floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below
Are sleeping as we fly
I’m holding very tight
I’m riding in the midnight blue
I’m finding I can fly
So high above with you

— from the movie The Snowman, Howard Blake

As many of us light the “love” candle this Sunday — the fourth Sunday of Advent — perhaps we will remember the little boy and his snowman in Raymond Brigg’s 1978 children’s book, The Snowman. It is a story of love and loss and magical beauty. In 1982, a British animated adaptation of the book features the hauntingly beautiful song, “Walking in the Air,” by composer Howard Blake. In this music/flying sequence, we are swept up in the magical travels across the sky of the boy and his snowman. The soul-stirring beauty of this song (sung by St. Paul’s Cathedral choir boy, Peter Auty) matched with the tender, pencil-sketched animation lifts us out of our despair for this world, and into a deeper connection with it.

“Walking in the Air” stirs the soul and expands our hearts to the size of the earth itself. Love, indeed! Perhaps such music can save us from the narrow, separate cubicles we tend to inhabit below, and the sense of loneliness and estrangement that rears its head for many during the holidays.

In this song, we are invited to rise above the separate parts, the entrenched views, the narrow focus, and fly into the wideness — the breadth and depth and wholeness of love. The transcendent sky gifts us with a breathtaking vision:  a bird’s-eye-view to explore our connections with people and snowmen and whales and icebergs. High up in the moonlit sky, we are lured by divine imagination into a wider sense of belonging, one that sustains us even in loss.

The image of the little boy and his snowman gliding through the midnight air with hands held tightly reminds me of the tiny baby in the manger and the view that God “dwells in the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (Whitehead). Yes, this is love, the deep and wide heart of Christmas. We need it now more the ever.

So, let’s go walking in the air! Hopefully, you can watch the entire 26-minute film with your family, or simply click below to hear the song by itself. Join me in this musical flight across the world, viewing life from above. A few moments up in the sky can change everything.

We’re walking in the air
We’re floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below
Are sleeping as we fly
I’m holding very tight
I’m riding in the midnight blue
I’m finding I can fly
So high above with you

Far across the world
The villages go by like dreams
The rivers and the hills
The forests and the streams

Children gaze open-mouthed
Taken by surprise
Nobody down below
Believes their eyes

We’re surfing in the air
We’re swimming in the frozen sky
We’re drifting over icy
Mountains floating by

Suddenly swooping low
On an ocean deep
Rousing up a mighty monster
From his sleep

We’re walking in the air
We’re dancing in the midnight sky
And everyone who sees us
Greets us as we fly

The Soul-Expanding Melodies of Sadness

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“I have hymns you haven’t heard.” –Rilke

“I want to fight until I don’t feel sad anymore,” cries the young Polish character in the WWII Masterpiece series, World on Fire. The boy had just lost both his mother and his homeland in 1939. It made me wonder, is that why we fight? Do we really think it will abolish our sadness? Fighting might abolish many things, but not our sadness.

What if we could, instead, fully inhabit our sadness in bearable ways? Would it help to give us a wider view of the situation — less narrow, rigid, and vengeful– flowing outward into compassion toward all sides? Would it stop the endless cycles of violence and us-vs-them wars?

Inhabit Your Situation

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus instructed his followers to “inhabit your situation.” Everything was against this great thinker. He was a slave with a physical disability, but he inhabited his situation, and by doing so, he found peace. So, too, in times of war, climate change, injustice, horror, and unbearable loss, we must first fully inhabit — or feel — our situation before we can transform it.

Music can help. So can poetry, prayer, art, a walk in the woods, or a hug from a friend. But in this essay, I will focus on music, for music is the incarnation of pure feeling. Music is our philosopher, our spiritual teacher, our therapist, our whole-making companion in this tragic world — a world hell-bent on grasping, dehumanization, rage, and violence.

Anger, Sadness, and the Divided Brain

According to the eminent psychiatrist, brain-hemisphere scientist, and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, anger and rage are part of how the left hemisphere “attends” to the world. It sees the world in terms of us and them, black and white. It abstracts rather than connects, prefers grasping and competition rather than cooperation and compassion. It interprets the world in mechanistic terms, leaving no room for spiritual and moral qualities of the soul. The left hemisphere is supposed to be a helper to the right hemisphere by breaking things down into separate parts for study, but the parts don’t make a whole.

McGilchrist describes how the two hemispheres are supposed to work together with the metaphor of music practice:

It is like learning a piece of music: first you are drawn to play it as a whole; then you break it down into bits and practice certain passages and analyse harmonic transitions, and so on; but in the performance all that must once again be set ruthlessly aside, or the results will be disastrous.” (The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning)

But we often get stuck in the left brain, without returning our attention to the whole — and disaster, indeed, ensues. McGilchrist’s twenty-year research on stroke victims reveals that anger is the single emotion attributed to the left brain with its narrow focus, rigid certainty, manipulation, self-interest — and prime motivation: power (over others).

All this sounds suspiciously like the world we live in today (and what Jesus tried to free us from with his parables). If left-hemisphere anger cannot be processed back into the broader view of the right brain, we get stuck in loops of rage that lead to vengeance, and finally, to self-destruction. This idea begs the question: Has the left brain hijacked our world?

The right hemisphere, on the other hand, attends to the world in quite the opposite way. It is the hemisphere of a wider intelligence, flow, meaning, empathy, sadness, joy, love, creativity, spirituality, humor, music, and poetry — all that makes life worth living. And yet, these aspects of humanity play second-fiddle in our culture.

Something is terribly wrong. It appears that humanity has indeed been usurped by left-hemisphere dominance to the peril of our planet and our humanity. Even our institutions are caught up in this hijacking. Think of all the secondary schools cutting music and art programs, the stubborn dominance of scientific materialism, the entrenchment of religious fundamentalism — the damage is pervasive in our culture.

But there are signs of hope.

Music Connects

In 1999, maestro Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian literary scholar Edward W. Said created a workshop for young musicians to promote coexistence and intercultural dialogue. They named the orchestra and workshop after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s collection of poems West-Eastern Divan, a central work for the development of the concept of world culture. An equal number of Israeli and Arab musicians form the base of the ensemble, together with members from Turkey, Iran, and Spain. They meet each summer for rehearsals, followed by an international concert tour. In Daniel Barenboim’s words, “the power of music lies in its ability to speak to all aspects of the human being — the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. Music teaches us, in short, that everything is connected.”

Everything is connected. Music and the arts in general can help restore the balance of our brains — and thus open us to the harmonies of spirituality, connection, cooperation, and beauty. Music helps us reinhabit our right brain with all its promising treasures. The intonations and rhythms of music — with or without words — widens our souls and steeps us in meaning that the left hemisphere knows not of.

Perhaps if we paid compassionate attention to our own sadness with the help of music, we might find within its depths the tender melodies of connection, empathy, and hope that will become contagious.

Our First Language

Music is primal. It was our first language — the true mother tongue. Music preceded referential language in our evolutionary history and is, even now, the language of dolphins and whales and birds. Music, like poetry, helps us move from the left-brain abstractions — including dehumanizing the “other” — into a wider sense of connection to the “other.”

Music expands our souls.

When it comes to sadness, music helps us bear the unbearable. It speaks in wordless feeling, like the maternal lullabies of God — not a distant God “up there” who intervenes now and then, but a loving presence who suffers with us, even while offering us the promise of a new melody, yet to be written. This God cannot control the happenings of this world; rather, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” But God’s tender voice persistently sings to us within our suffering, luring us toward fresh possibilities with the rhythm, harmony, and intensity of music.  

Music can help us bear our despair, until it is no longer despair. Until it rises up to form something new and fresh. . . .“I have hymns you haven’t heard.”

If we can let go of our narrow left-brain grasp on rage and revenge, we might dare to enter our own sadness; and if we can fully and safely enter our own sadness, we might venture a little farther out to the sadness of others — even to the sadness of the “other.” If we have the courage to do this, we touch something divine and wholly sacred: We are choosing to share in the very suffering of God.

Hymns We Haven’t Sung

In these frightful times, we need to find more ways to sing together. But this is rare these days, except in our faith communities. Perhaps a focus on music and singing could be the road back for faith communities in decline? Forget the long, well-crafted sermon (says the preacher) and focus on music — all kinds of music! – hymns, songs, and instrumental music that nurtures feelings of openness, love, and hope. And sadness, too. To stay in the flow of process, perhaps fresh hymn lyrics of healing and inclusion can be wedded to old, familiar tunes that no longer speak to us theologically. We need hymns in minor keys, too, that touch our collective sadness in a way that brings connection and hope in our communities.

But we also need to do our individual work of inhabiting our sadness, especially if we are introverts. I suggest a music meditation with something like the intimate melodies of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes, no. 1-5, a profound work combining East/West intonations which nourish our right hemisphere of connection even as it cradles our sadness in something larger than our sadness.

For meditation practice, be sure to listen all the way through no. 5, as the last one seems to help transition the listener back to a neutral state after a deep dive into the depth of feeling. In this intimate connection to sound and feeling, you will discover a sense of cosmic companionship; that is, your sadness is cradled in something larger than yourself — the divine “fellow-sufferer, who understands” (Whitehead). The hidden melodies inside the sadness will sing to you of hope and transformation.  

For the truth is, if you have the capacity for empathy, you will be sad, especially in times like these. But once you fully inhabit your sadness, you will see that there is more than simply sadness. Sadness has other close friends like compassion, joy, hilarity, beauty, and hope.

Inhabiting your sadness through music will nourish your right brain, widen your soul, and help you develop the ability to transform anger into compassionate action rather than fighting and vengeance. Music connects us not only to one another, but to the “other,” and to the deeper divine melodies of hope and possibility. 

Finally, look for novelty in the way you feel. One comment under this particular video (below) states: “When I heard Gnossienne no. 1 for the first time, I basically unlocked a new emotion/feeling.”

Oh, yes, there are hymns we have not heard!  Are you listening?

**This essay was first published on Spirituality and Practice, October 22, 2023

Sourdough Spirituality

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Sometimes, you just have to bake something. At least I do. Especially after a long news segment on very serious issues like the climate crisis and threats to democracy. When such big worries about the future threaten to undo me, I first pet the cat, assuring him that everything will be all right; then I march into the kitchen and begin throwing flour around. I don’t actually throw it, but it looks that way, given the mess I make. We all have these odd little rituals and spiritual practices that keep us grounded in the present moment, centered, and tethered to the goodness in the world. Sometimes they are not familiar rituals, but brand-new adventures — like my latest foray into the world of baking sourdough bread.

And like most adventures, there is a moment when you ask yourself, “What was I thinking?” Baking sourdough bread turned out to be more complicated than I imagined. After watching endless intimidating YouTube videos on the subject, all espousing different methods, my longing for old-world bread slowly crumbled in the face of its complexity. The “sourdough starter,” the timing, the equipment, the new vocabulary (autolyze, proofing, bread lame, etc.) — it all made my head spin. Was there a sourdough secret society? Rarified secrets that only the few and gifted can know? How did bakers of old do it?

So I tried. And I failed, throwing out a perfectly good starter with a sigh of resignation and defeat.

But then I discovered a straightforward, old-world approach to making sourdough bread from Ikaria, Greece, that seemed to fit my KISS (Keep-It-Simple-Stupid) approach to baking. But I was also intrigued. The little island of Ikaria is famously noted by National Geographic Explorer Dan Buettner as a Blue Zone, a hot spot for long-lived, thriving centenarians. Apparently, whole-grain sourdough bread is one of their secrets, along with a plant-based diet, faith, walking, and helping one another. Their strong sense of community helps them not only live long but live well. And what is a community without breaking bread together?

Let us Break Bread Together

In my faith, we break bread every Sunday in a holy feast of sharing. We call it the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Eucharist means “thanksgiving” so it is a ritual of gratitude. Bread should be this: healthful, delicious, and shared with one another in a spirit of thanksgiving. A lovely loaf of bread reminds me to be grateful and to share. 

And so, out of the ashes of defeat, I rose again to the challenge of bread baking. I ordered a new San Francisco starter culture and began to feed it. I have learned the hard way that you can’t ignore this thriving bacterial wonder. Like my cat, it must be fed twice a day. And, like my cat, there are consequences if you forget.

For centuries, sourdough starter was the only way of leavening bread, until commercial yeast came into fashion to make our lives easier. Now, we are discovering that the old-world, wild yeast from sourdough possesses health-giving properties that cannot be replicated with commercial yeast. With this new-found knowledge, I now respect the starter as a living thing, not to be thrown out in a fit of frustration or left to die. Sourdough starters, lovingly known as “mother dough,” are sometimes passed down from generation to generation, which is mind-boggling. You could be eating bread fermented by the very same starter that your great-great grandma used! Yes, this amazing culture, harnessed from the air and nurtured by flour and water, can outlive us several times over. (I still feel bad about throwing out that first starter.)

“Wonder” Bread

Okay, so now I am faced with this amazing life form, always hungry for flour. Flour is cheaper than cat food, but still, it seems wasteful. What’s to keep this thing from eating me out of house and home? I tried using less flour in each feeding, but the starter was not impressed and refused to give me a single bubble. Yes, it’s like adopting a finicky cat. And yet, it’s also like a science project back in the day. Even the jar I bought for the starter looks a bit like a beaker out of a high school science lab.

A sense of wonder and awe floods my soul as I contemplate the growing culture in my jar, a thriving bacterial life that I am nurturing twice a day. A life form with purpose, the starter ferments the flour. But while the active culture dies inside the bread, it leaves behind a valuable “prebiotic” for the digestive system, helping the human body thrive with health. This reminds me that death is not extinction, but transformation. I also wonder what I will leave behind — and hope that it will be nourishing.

Oh, the secret life of trees and bees and sourdough starter! It’s all a wonder and all of a piece. When we think of “life” we tend to think of human life or animal life, or perhaps plant life; but life (or at least experience) goes all the way down. Bacteria is a simpler life form, but no less important to the web of connections that we are born into. The entire web, bacteria and all, is infused with divinity – a wondrous thought! I contemplate this when I feed my starter, thinking of all the fresh possibilities being nurtured into actuality with a little love and attention. 

Creative Transformation

Once the well-fed starter is full of happy bubbles, I am finally ready to gather my simple ingredients: starter, flour, salt, and water, and put it all together. Things finally begin to take shape in this act of “the many become one.” As I don my apron and begin to work the dough with my hands, I breathe in the earthy aroma of wheat fields connecting me back to the soil, from which all life springs. Following the old-world way, I knead the dough vigorously for 20 minutes. Of course, today there are “no-knead” methods, but I feel the urge to follow the Ikarian way and put some muscle into it. It may be the only upper body workout I get this week.

My whole being participates in the stretching and folding, pushing and pulling, until the dough transforms from a listless lump of separate ingredients to an elastic whole that feels smooth and satisfying in my hands — something like the Playdough of my childhood. Physical labor and play find each other in the kneading of bread.

The kinesthetic feel of the dough in my hands reminds me that we are God’s hands in this world, working lovingly with the push and pull of life to bring about something nourishing and beautiful — like justice, kindness, sustainability, and the messy business of democracy. Only when we wholeheartedly engage in the world, take risks, connect, love — without any guarantee of outcome — can we find meaning.

Let It Be

I now shape the dough into a ball and “let it be.” It’s time to put in the earbuds and hum along with Paul McCartney while allowing the dough to sit for a couple of hours in a warm place. In the spirit of “a time for every purpose” I now cease my labor and let the work of love do its thing. There is a time to knead and a time to rest, allowing what I nurture to ferment and grow on its own, to rise and expand — to simply become itself. I’ve done my part; it is now out of my hands. In response, the bread dough expands like the Universe. In the waiting, I learn how to be patient, hopeful, and trust in the fermenting power of love. (This also gives me time to brush off my cat who, by this time, is lightly dusted in errant flour.)

Bread of Heaven

Finally, I bake the loaf with the joy of anticipation. My kitchen is filled with the heady aroma of baking bread. In fact, the entire house is infused with its earthy scent. And then — voila! The timer dings, telling me that the bread is done; it has been transformed from earth to table through a labor of love; it is now, an incarnation of divine freshness to enjoy and share.

The taste is tangy and satisfying, especially with a toaster, butter, and my favorite jam. I’m still learning and trying out a host of variations, but I am thankful to the Ikarian old-world inspiration to get me out of my defeatist funk. Because I am not a professional baker, I have no ambition toward perfection. (Some of my loaves come out comically lopsided, but who cares? The sourdough police?) It’s not the perfect outcome that gives satisfaction, but rather the process of baking that calms the mind and renews the spirit.

While a host of spiritual practices can be extracted in the process of bread baking — living in the present moment, gratitude, wonder, nurture, connections, love, transformation, play — I find joy to be at the top of the list. We can all get re-acquainted with joy when we choose to work with nature’s gifts to create something with our hands or with our voices or with our words. Creativity brings the yet-to-be into existence, and no matter how it bakes up, the process itself is thrilling.

Baking bread reminds me that every moment is an act of co-creation: we take the ingredients we have, stir in divine possibilities, and bake something fresh and delicious to nourish the world. Sometimes, the pain of this world makes me too sad for words, so I bake bread to re-ignite joy. Somehow it helps to know that out of the dust of the earth, life continues to spring forth in hope — even with something as humble as a loaf of bread.

Beauty in the Dark

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Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

What batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

On my last Sunday as a working minister, the choir in our congregation sang the soulful Irish hymn Be Thou My Vision. I sat rapt behind the pulpit, deeply moved, juxtaposing my own struggles with advanced glaucoma with this spiritual invitation to a wider vision. For the truth is, my physical vision is narrowing into darkness, year by year, despite all medical interventions to date. The encroaching darkness has grounded me from driving, nudged me into unplanned retirement, and makes it difficult to read or move about without fear of bodily injury. There’s no getting round the natural human reaction of distress and fear of going completely blind, feelings which I know must be fully felt as I “move back and forth” into the change. 

But there is more to vision, isn’t there? Perhaps this is where “the bitter drink” transforms me into wine, After all, there is the unseen, the spiritual, the inner vision that transcends our five senses. Helen Keller displayed remarkable vision and hearing even though being deaf and blind. She could “see” the beauty of the world in ways we can’t imagine and she “heard” music through feeling vibrations. Beethoven heard music in his mind when he grew deaf, creating the Ninth Symphony, his magnum opus. Keller and Beethoven were drawn to the spiritual world and the world of beauty and music. Such luminaries remind me of the untapped possibilities beyond the five senses. This is possible because the reality we live in is much larger and more interesting than we once believed.

In the world of David Hume, rock star of the Scottish Enlightenment, we can only know what we perceive through our five senses. But after the revolution in science in the early twentieth century, we see that quantum physics opened us to a much more interesting view of reality for both scientists and philosophers. The great philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, taking this new reality of the invisible world of quanta into account, proposed that the world of knowing (epistemology) is much larger than the five senses, and includes the Divine presence, too.

God is present in the world in a most intimate way, but is also more than the world (panentheism). That “moreness” may be something we experience more fully after this life: a holy reality called by many names: heaven, paradise, the depths of God. I find it fascinating that so many of those who have reported Near Death Experiences reveal common stories not only of radiant light but also of a loving, embracing darkness at the core of everything. The womb of God? Perhaps.

But here we are, adventurers in this earthly experience, struggling to find our way together  —  some of us stumbling over furniture and cats as we lose light and clarity. We all struggle against the darkness, either metaphorically or literally. But there is good news, too, which was my joy as a minister to share with others:  Within this ever-expanding universe, God is present in every droplet of experience, luring us to incarnate possibilities for beauty and wholeness. God feels my experience with me — even the frustration and fear — and within this deep knowing, fashions fresh possibilities for ongoing novel experiences and new ways of knowing the world.

And so, if my visual darkness is to be a bell tower, then, with a little effort on my part, I can become the bell, ringing out a new song, enlarging my soul, discovering fresh adventures of the spirit. Part of this transformation includes the other four senses: will I learn to hear with more sensitivity? But more than this, there is an invisible realm to the world, and that includes the presence of divinity in every unfolding moment.

I love the God of process theology, who is “the fellow sufferer, who understands.” This intimate Companion — Soul of the world– is the source of novelty and creativity in the universe. And yet, God is invisible. So much of what matters is invisible, like the music of bells and the experience of love.

The visible and invisible unfold together inside a divine yearning for beauty — improvising, uncertain in every way, and often tragic. The whole cosmic process is enticingly mysterious. Besides the world of energy events that make up what we think of as matter, 95 % of the universe is dark matter and dark energy: dark matter holds everything together in an invisible embrace while dark energy hastens the expansion of the universe. What a contrasting pair of invisible friends! While science probes this mystery with the launch of Europe’s Euclid space telescope, we will perhaps find something that ignites the next scientific revolution. In this universe of wonder and beauty, we know that something important happens in the dark.

We continue to evolve with deeper insights in science, philosophy, psychology, theology, and in every area of human endeavor. But one thing we know now: we are not limited to the five senses. Reality is larger and more interesting than we can imagine! This gives me solace on bad days. Instead of feeling that I am losing something while my world gets narrower and darker, I can “look” with my inner vision to turn “disability” into possibility.

I really hope for a cure for glaucoma in my lifetime, but thanks to my moorings in process theology, I know that whatever happens, I have deep reservoirs for “seeing” with spiritual eyes, for expanding my soul, and for discovering a whole new realm of beauty in the darkness.