I am writing on Sunday which, for me, begins with downloading the podcast of the current interview by Krista Tippett. Today the interview to which I have now listened three times is with the anthropologist and linguist, Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson who is also the daughter of the famous anthropologists Dr. Margaret Mead and Dr. Gregory Bateson.
Dr. Bateson is also a writer, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a neighbor and a Christian who is also a reader/lector in her church.
In listening to her I also felt a sense of passion and loving energy which seems to be somehow transmitted even through the magic of listening to the podcast on my iPhone.
If I had to say in an outline what I am going to take form this brief meeting with her this morning, I would have to say that, for now, I will take: wonder, cooperation, we, humor, openness, and love. As so often happens when listening to others while reading or “hearing,” I was reminded of old friends – friends I have not met in person but to whom I am deeply indebted. Today such friends include Dr. Margaret Mead, Job, William Blake, and Rudyard Kipling. She refers in the interview to a poem by Kipling which speaks of heaven as a place of tireless creativity. This led me to remember another poem by Mr. Kipling – “if” – which, despite the limits of its sexist ending – is, for me a sage reminder:
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!
.
Rudyard Kipling
One of Dr. Bateson’s books is entitled, Composing a Life. Later she wrote,Composing a Further Life – the Age of Active Wisdom. She is now in the process of writing a book entitled Love Across Differences.
Previously, the reader and I have explored concepts such as noticing, being present, and intentional living. Dr. Bateson talks about composing a life. Perhaps because of who her parents were she began her life as a participant observer very early. Once, as a very young child, her mother took her on visit to the home of a friend who had a very difficult son about the same age. When her mother, Margaret Mead, asked how the time with him went, she replied that she was going to dictate her observations when she got home. Already she was recognizing the importance of recognizing that she was a participant in the interaction with him (perhaps she then felt more like a victim) and an observer. As we now know that practice of being a participant observer has shaped all the roles in which she continues to engage. As an observer, she brings a sense of wonder and an eagerness to learn. Her reaction to the events following the bombings in the United States on 9/11 are typical. During the interview with Ms. Tippett, she says: “Well, six years, say. So I thought I should be doing something to address the Islamophobia, the hostility, the prejudice, that has grown up in this country after 9/11. The way I went about it was to say, “What is it that makes me as a Christian empathize with a Muslim? At what point are we together?” And what struck me is that what actually all three of the religions that come from Abraham — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — what we all have in common is the sense of wonder that leads to praise. That is to say, when you go from wonder to a religious context, shared worship, something like that, it takes the form of praise. And in spite of the huge differences in other aspects of the traditions, a different set of rules, expectations, behaviors, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum — praise is central in all of them.”
At another times she says of Job: “ I think the point about the Book of Job is that Job is a virtuous member of an institution. He’s respectable, he obeys all the rules, he’s complacent, he goes through the appropriate rituals that were required in his community at that time. But he’s lost his sense of wonder. And then God says, “Look. Just look. Realize how beautiful it is. How complicated it is.”
Her point seems to be that when we lose our sense of wonder we are not able to feel gratitude (my word) which then leads to praise. Praise is, for her, the essence of worship. Even when looking at nature she presents the origin of the appearance of a nucleus which is essential for complicated forms of life with a delightful sense of the joining of two cells. You can just hear the cells saying to each other. “Let’s visit. Let us see what more we can be together.”
This morning while enjoying the company of my young high school, Egyptian friend, Youssef, we were talking about his difficulty in finding a passion for the subject of math. I asked, “What is your favorite subject?” He replied, “English.” “Ahh,” I said, “You like how language allows words to play with each other. What if we could see math as just another language to talk about relationships? Think about it. There is you and there is I and together we are more than either of us. One plus one equals two which contains the description of our relationship.” His brother who was with us said, “That is not the way they talk about math in school.” I agreed. There is seldom the sense of wonder which comes from the “we” which math can allow us to observe, participate in, and talk about.
Mrs. Tibbett talked about the gifts that Dr. Bateson and her siblings brought her father when he was living the last stage of this life journey. A volume of Blake’s poetry, and flowers, and a crab because you said, “in memory of the way he had taught each of us to study tide pools, and the way he had taken a crab with him year after year to his opening classes at the San Francisco Art Institute to open his students’ eyes to the fearful symmetries of organic life.” And then you said Nora, which was his — your step-sister, right? Brought a bagel because he ...And she brought a bagel because your father had quipped at Esalen that the hole in a bagel would be reincarnated as a donut.
In other places she talks about the importance of play which, as I have previously posited, allows us to let go of expectations of what we expect to happen or what we expect to hear or see. In play we are all social scientists open to what is possible. Of course, we can call very planned out activities play but that is not how I think of play and certainly not the kind of play to which Dr. Bateson refers.
It seems as is often in my thinking, my writing and certainly in my choice of mentors I keep coming back to the same themes. Whether the mechanism is a spiritual practice, play, a step-by-step program such as the 12 steps of AA or NA, the dance of an anthropologist, the wanderings of a creative artist patiently and playfully seeing what note or brush stroke the preceding one will call up we are, as humans, at our best when we are open to new levels of the “we” of creation; of the “we” of celebrating the wonder of these two cells or two people or the sperm and an egg or two hearts, in gratitude, coming together to celebrate this magic we call life.
Written October 4, 2015
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