The gift of being born: Reflecting on natality and gratitude on Mother’s Day

Fresno Bee, May 14, 2023

Mother’s Day is for gratitude. Our mothers nurtured and supported us. We thank them for the fact of our own births. We should also thank our mothers for modeling the art of kindness, and the power of love.

Life is precious, rare and interconnected. It’s not accidental that we speak of Mother Earth and Mother Nature. There is no other planet that supports life. And life on this planet unfolds through a long chain of mothers, extending back into prehistory.

That process of generation and birth shows us the depth of our interconnected existence. We are not born alone. And life is not only a struggle for survival. It is also a warm embrace that pays itself forward. The nurturing arms that received us into this world show us the sustaining power of lovingkindness.

The Dalai Lama once said, “When we’re born, our mothers show us compassion. This is a natural response that has nothing to do with spiritual practice. Without that kindness we wouldn’t survive. So, our lives start with an experience of kindness and compassion.”

Philosophers have directed our attention to the importance of birth and being born. This is the idea of our “natality,” which is the opposite of mortality. We are mortal beings who die. But we are also interdependent beings who were born, and who give birth. Every human being emerges from the body of another, who literally carried us within her. Remembering this strange mammalian fact can make us humble, grateful and kind.

The concept of natality was brought to light by Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a German Jew who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe. She arrived as a refugee in New York. She wrote extensively about totalitarianism and evil. The world is not all sweetness and light. And some people are born with cruel mothers, or their mothers are cruelly taken from them.

And yet, hope appears in the concept of natality, and the fact of our interdependence. Arendt celebrated the possibility of new birth and new beginnings. “The miracle that saves the world,” Arendt explained in 1958, “is ultimately the fact of natality.” When cruelty, stupidity and violence threaten to tear things apart, we can hope that new humans will be born and better ideas will arise. The terror of death is real. But so too is the promise of birth.

Natality involves hospitality. In some extreme cases, hospitality rescues refugees from cruelty and death, as in the case of those fleeing a genocide. But even in ordinary circumstances, we make the world better by welcoming strangers. Indeed, our mothers welcomed us into their bodies. They received us into the world, suckled us, nurtured us, and devoted themselves to us. That welcoming and receptive aspect of maternity is a central feature of our humanity.

This is not exclusively female. Men can welcome and receive. And fathers can be loving and kind. But there is humbling wisdom to be learned in the mysterious unfolding of maternity and birth.

Even the strongest king came into this world naked and defenseless. The first moment of every human life is an act of welcome. To be human is to be received, as a gift. We exist because our mothers loved us first.

Christianity makes natality a central part of the cosmic story. Each person is created in God’s image. And even the savior was born of a woman. The story also tells us that the savior and his mother fled persecution after his birth. The gospel of love grows out of the story of a refugee and his mother.

One need not be a Christian to understand this. It is discovered deep in the milk of human kindness. But we forget our interdependence. Too often, we refuse to welcome strangers. We build up our defenses, and exclude those who need our kindness. Maybe we are trying to fend off death. Perhaps we hope that in defending our turf, we might live forever. But death comes to us all. Mortality is a fact.

Yet natality is also a fact. Tomorrow, a new generation will be born. Our task is to welcome those newcomers, as our mothers welcomed us; to love our neighbors, as our mothers loved us.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article275327426.html#storylink=cpy

May 9, 2021May 4, 2022

On Motherly Love

Motherly love is neglected in ethics. The Golden Rule speaks of brotherly love. It says, “love your neighbor as yourself.” But we might also say: “love your neighbor as a mother loves her children.”

Brotherly love creates solidarity and respect. Motherly love is a more active process of nurture and care. A mother’s love is specific. It concerns itself with your unique well-being. Brotherly love spreads widely and grows thin. Motherly love is intense: it responds to your needs and encourages you to fulfill your potential. Brotherly love is universal and abstract. Motherly love is for real people with concrete needs.

Motherly love involves labor. To live well is to participate in the labor of mothering: to give birth, to nurture, and to care. We all do this. The poet is a mother. So too is the musician, scientist, and farmer. Anyone who gestates, nurtures, and grows things is a mother.

Patriarchal metaphors confuse us. We speak of founding fathers. We imagine an artist imposing his will on the world. We see the farmer as inserting his seed and extracting the fruit. But art, politics, and agriculture require nurturing care.

We also conceive of God as a father who begets a son. This patriarchal metaphor limits our imagination. Divine creativity is not masculine imposition. Rather, it is an unfolding from within. It makes sense to say that God gives birth to the world.

A hidden account of the importance of motherly love can be found in ancient philosophy.

When Pythagoras descended into a cave seeking wisdom, he was nurtured there by his mother. She was the only person he communicated with from his dark retreat. When he emerged from his cave, he began teaching about reincarnation. This symbolic re-birth—the emergence from a cave—shows up Plato’s allegory of the cave as well as in the Christian Easter story.

Pythagoras’s theory of reincarnation allowed that he had once been a woman. So it is no surprise that he brought women into his school. His wife, Theano, and his daughter, Damo, were among his most important disciples.

Socrates also spoke of mothering. He described himself as a midwife who helps others give birth to the wisdom that is within them. That process is guided by love, conceived in motherly terms.

The source of Socratic midwifery was a mystical woman named Diotima. She taught Socrates the mysteries of motherly love. Diotima said, “All of us are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and in soul, and, as soon as we come to a certain age, we naturally desire to give birth.”

These ideas gestated and evolved for centuries until Plotinus offered a grand synthesis. He invoked female energies in his theology. The god of love, Eros, is the child of Aphrodite. Thus the creative energy of the universe comes from the goddess. And in one pregnant passage, Plotinus suggests that Aphrodite is identical with the cosmos itself, which is a process of the unfolding of motherly love.

These metaphors are fascinating. But we must be careful. In a patriarchal world, women are often reduced to their capacity to be mothers. A deeper vision of the power of motherly love calls patriarchy into question. The ancient thinkers hinted that mothering was fundamental. This vision empowered women as it did in the Pythagorean school. And it is inclusive: it is for women and men, poets and philosophers.

Contemporary authors have also made this point. Hannah Arendt focused on “natality” as “the capacity to begin something anew.” And Nel Noddings calls our attention to what she calls “the maternal factor.” Patriarchy ignores the amazing organic capacity of the female body. The life of the species flows through mother’s bodies. But motherly love is not merely about bodies: natality and maternity are spiritual metaphors.

Mothering is the compassionate heart of ethics. It is available to every human being who has been mothered and cared for. Brotherly love is fine. But a higher love models itself on a mother’s love for her children. This is a love that is careful, graceful, and nurturing. Motherly love is fundamental. It may even be the pregnant power of the universe itself.

June 25, 2020June 25, 2020

On Loneliness and Solitude

An article in Time describes a “plague of loneliness” exacerbated by social distancing during the pandemic. But being alone does not mean being lonely. Some dread solitude. Others use it to create, think, and dream.

Loneliness can be caused by social conditions. The isolation of the pandemic provides an obvious example. An isolating culture can reinforce psychological pathologies such as agoraphobia and social anxiety.

But solitude can be inspiring. Poets and philosophers have often affirmed it. Emerson said, “people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar.” By “vulgar” Emerson means “ordinary.” Emersonian solitude seeks to transcend the ordinary. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche agreed. They imagined the great soul rising above the vulgar masses, alone on a mountaintop.

This is a typically masculine idea, patronizing and condescending. Men have traditionally been free to indulge heroic individualism. Women were not permitted the luxury of what Virginia Woolf called “a room of her own”—a refuge for creative individuality.

Freedom and creativity are essential for avoiding the dread of loneliness. Solitude is not dreadful when freely chosen. To be forced into solitary confinement is a terrible punishment. But the mystic chooses silent meditation and the poet retreats to her private room.

The dread of loneliness is connected to boredom. Lonely people are isolated with nothing to do. But solitude can be replete with activity. Indeed, some activities require us to be alone.

Hannah Arendt explained the difference between the productive solitude of the life of the mind and a more dreadful kind of loneliness. In loneliness, you exist as a mere object and not as an active thinking being. But in productive solitude, you keep good company with yourself.

The novelist Thomas Wolfe once claimed that he was the loneliest person he knew. He understood that loneliness gives rise to the desire for self-expression. But he also knew that loneliness lingers as the after-effect of the creative act, an emptiness that remains after your song has been sung.

Wolfe saw loneliness as “the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” Loneliness, he said, sucks the joy from life, leaving us empty, impotent, ruined, and lost. Time seems to flow on without us, while we sit “drugged and fettered in the prison of loneliness.”

One solution is found in religion. Religious thinkers have plumbed the depths of solitude, retreating to monasteries and sitting in silence. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, explained that solitude opens an abyss within that points toward the infinite. A different religious idea is offered by Dorothy Day who said that we overcome loneliness through service, community, and love. She explained, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love.”

This is a common refrain: to transform loneliness into love. A poem from Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“Finding”) provides a poignant example:

Out of the great darkness and wide wastes of silence,
Long loneliness, and slow untasted years,
Came a slow filling of the empty places,
A slow, sweet lighting of forgotten faces,
A smiling under tears.

Gilman reminds us that loneliness is what allows memory to unfold. When alone we can enjoy the memory of those we’ve lost. Later in the same poem, she explores how lost love opens onto a broader love:

Love like the rain that falls on just and unjust,
Love like the sunshine, measureless and free,
From each to all, from all to each, to live in;
And, in the world's glad love so gladly given,
Came heart's true love to me!

Here we get a sense of the strange productive power of solitude. From out of loneliness grows the urge to communicate and to love.

The highest human goods—art, religion, and philosophy—require solitude: a quiet and empty space in which the spirit can unfold. Instead of allowing solitude to devolve into dreadful loneliness and succumbing to boredom, we must find ways to fill the emptiness with meaning, whether in exploring our memories or writing poetry. This is also what scientists, entrepreneurs, bakers, and gardeners do: they create, build, and explore. The aloneness of the creative soul is a pregnant at-one-ness, waiting to give birth to beauty, knowledge, and love.

July 22, 2016July 27, 2016

Auschwitz, evil, and hope

Auschwitz and the need for hope

Fresno Bee, July 22, 2016

Human nature is not fixed; we can change
The first step is not becoming blind to injustice
The second is working harder to craft a world we want

I toured Auschwitz in Poland on the same day a man drove a truck through a crowd of people in the south of France. More than 80 people were killed in France. Millions were killed at Auschwitz. This world breaks our hearts.

We might blame religion or ideology for all of this slaughter, but beneath the ideology is a human disease. Cruelty is common. So is indifference. The cure is compassion and responsibility.

A photo taken at the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp just after its liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945 shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing.

At Auschwitz, mechanized mass murder became routine. Victims arrived on trains. They were systematically exterminated, desecrated and incinerated. The process was cold, systematic and industrial.

Who could do such things? And why do they continue to happen?

Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, suggested that Auschwitz remains with us. He described the disease of Auschwitz as “the denial of human solidarity, obtuse or cynical indifference to the suffering of others, the abdication of the intellect and the moral sense in the face of authority, and at the root of it all, a tide of cowardice, an abysmal cowardice, masked as warrior virtue.”

Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish philosopher, called our attention to “the banality of evil.” She thought that great evil resulted from mediocre people acting thoughtlessly. She described Adolph Eichmann, who implemented the “Final Solution,” not as a monster but as a clown.

Cruel deeds and evil ideologies are common, as is thoughtless buffoonery. The challenge is to remain appalled in a world awash in murder and mayhem. The worst thing would be to view evil and stupidity as normal, natural and unavoidable. The worst thing would be to return evil for evil with an indifferent shrug that fails to be revolted by the horrors of the world.

That is why we need hope.

Philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This phrase is quoted at the beginning of the tour of Auschwitz.

The quote is taken from a much larger book in which Santayana argues that human nature is not fixed. New species evolve. New ideas emerge. Improved social structures and moral ideals are imaginable. Santayana concluded with a hopeful thought, “evils are transitory and better times may come.”

But for better times to come, we must continue to be outraged by cruelty and thoughtlessness. We must continually acknowledge the depth of human depravity if we are to avoid it. And we must recognize that we can and do evolve.

Memorials to the victims of the Holocaust are found across Germany, including in the heart of Berlin. Last month, the German parliament voted to recognize the Armenian genocideand Germany’s complicity with the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. This acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide is part of an ongoing project that takes responsibility for evil and says, “Never again.”

The German parliament includes a number of ethnically Turkish politicians, who voted in support of the Armenian genocide resolution. Germany’s multicultural parliament is quite different from the racially homogeneous vision of the Third Reich. Evolution occurs.

But things also stay the same. Turkey condemned the Armenian genocide resolution. It called the Turkish-German politicians who voted in favor of the resolution traitors. It recalled its ambassador from Berlin. There were death threats.

AND SO IT WILL GO, UNLESS WE STAND TOGETHER
AGAINST VIOLENCE, INTOLERANCE AND STUPIDITY.

And so it goes. And so it will go, unless we stand together against violence, intolerance and stupidity.

The Auschwitz memorial celebrates one story of moral courage. A Polish priest, Maximilian Kolbe, was sent to Auschwitz. In July of 1941, the commandant sentenced 10 prisoners to a miserable death by starvation. Father Kolbe volunteered to die in place of one of these men. He survived 10 days of starvation and was executed by lethal injection.

Father Kolbe was eventually canonized. A phrase attributed to him provides a warning and an inspiration: “The most deadly poison of our times is indifference.”

In a bleeding world, indifference is a defense mechanism. There is often too much stupid cruelty to bear, so we turn away. It is easy to lose faith in the future. But revulsion in the face of evil is a sign of our humanity. We ought to be apalled.

And then we ought to work to make this a world that doesn’t break our hearts.