Cover art for the book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James
[T]he practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint’s magic gift to humankind….he(sic) is an effective ferment for goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order.…[T]he Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticality and non-adaptation to present …conditions, analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness and are slow leavens of a better order.
What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be compatible with their spiritual selves as war…is incompatible. …[O]ne wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be…the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience(1902)
I like stories about turning points. I suppose they’re all variations of coming-of-age stories, telling about the transformation from child to adult. When I was a teenager this change seemed to me about nothing more “strenuous” (a favorite word of William James’s) than getting the keys to the car or an I.D. for getting proofed in bars. Liberal society provides no clues for the kind of transformation that is in effect spiritual enlargement, or “conversion.”
Last week, we watched a very good coming-of-age story. The Starling Girl (2023, dir. Laurel Parmet) is set in a fundamentalist Christian community in Kentucky, its children raised strictly according to patriarchal biblical interpretation. Thus the girl Jem’s growing up was not complicated by alcohol or drugs, boyfriends and dating, by rock concerts, social dancing or social media, only by fundamentalist orthodoxy: at 17 she’s considered of marriageable age, ready to be courted by a boy selected by her parents and the pastor. While it seems to be – and is – a story about a Romeo and Juliet “forbidden love,” (apologies for the spoiler – the movie is beautifully made and worth watching even if you know) the real crisis is deeper; its “resolution” in her solitary, ecstatic dance in her soul’s Mecca of a Memphis bar.
In a talk at The Other Side in Utica, in late February, film scholar “Everett” told us about the turning point in his life, in the 1970’s, during the time of his earlier career as a literature scholar. Bob Dylan was on his mind – he’d just seen A Complete Unknown 4 times – in particular, he mentioned the song called You Gotta Serve Somebody. His watershed moment occurred in conjunction with a failed marriage and a new relationship; it evolved, that is, from crisis. In coming out of it, he chose to “serve” avant garde films and film makers for which he’d discovered he had a passion, and to abandon the more secure career path he’d been on. With his expertise and his connections in this avant garde niche, he found steady employment teaching film part-time at several prestigious eastern colleges and finally full time at elite Hamilton College, making him almost a poster boy for “following one’s bliss.”
These days, in the vacuum left by the loss of our Cafe, the “heavenward” good which Orin and I served for nearly 22 years, I envy Everett – or anyone – whose bliss-following led to a real-world good, a clear vocation. My life’s turning point, which I have written about many times, was not toward a specific calling. Unless I failed to interpret correctly which is possible, it was solely a transformation of imagination. Though it laid the spiritual foundation for the Cafe a few years later, the turning point had no this-world destiny attached.
What I had learned from my crisis, was entirely subjective; the experience, though matching the experiences described over and over in James’s famous book, seemed to take me away from religion, or I interpreted it that way; it fact, it happened after my conversion to Catholicism a couple of years earlier, seemingly a “correction” to it. Apparently I needed an experience in the darkness of my own soul; my turning point was the connection with my imagination. My experience, like the ones William James writes about, was life changing; where there had been no sense or meaning, suddenly there was! Indeed, “only connect,” as E.M. Forster wrote. For me, this illumination was sufficient in itself. I was then as now a writer; the experience added a sense of purpose to my writing – the supreme message, to me, like Jem Starling’s, was express yourself. I was outside of some kind of cage that had kept me in – of which I’d not even been aware.
But my writing, however necessary, never seemed to me like a vocation; I was neither poet nor novelist. It was more an act of personal prayer, keeping the life-changing, soul-deep experience, the divine visitation, alive. I was not prepared, like Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to replicate a religion, although I could feel a glimmer of motivation in that direction! The most direct this-world consequence of this second conversion was the “Temenos talks” I began a a few years after we opened our Cafe, in which I read aloud a completed essay, then followed with discussion and often a poem from Orin or someone else. These tiny gatherings felt, always, to me like a secret hidden cell of aliveness, occurring beneath the great “hardness” all around, a kind of council fire that was lit apparently by my words as if people were just waiting for this perspective to be spoken.
For better or worse, although I’m clear this “perspective” doesn’t come from my normal consciousness, I was never comfortable claiming I spoke for God, or defining God as Butler’s character does. However, I conceive of what I do as speaking to a real – however unacknowledged – thirst for God – i.e., for the reassurance that connection-unity-inclusivity are ultimate truth. That is, I can point, but the experience – to slake the thirst – is left to individual experience as it must be.
I can call the ‘whom” I serve through my writing “She who speaks through my imagination.” Because of the distinct otherness of the voice I scribe for, there’s a continuous struggle to believe in this other who speaks solely to me, whom only I recognize. Though she surely enlarges me, expands me beyond my ordinary “street” self, she is available to me only in my solitude. Thus my writing, always, reflects this struggle with unbelief, that is, the struggle is with liberal, rational, secular, higher education-edified totality. Even with all its tolerance, all its permissiveness, the liberal totality functions for me – with no socialists or unionists in my family tree, no ethnics or outlaws to assist me – in effect like the Christian fundamentalists in the movie; serving the dominant egoic reality, it stifles imagination. And my ego – particularly its self-negating, passivity-inducing function – just doesn’t want to give up.
So in the end – or so far – this splitness that fuels all my writing is I believe, or hope, what makes it possible to speak to the souls of others who, like me, have adjusted decently to liberal society, at whatever cost to the soul. The cost of a ticket out of splitness is high; definitely painful, it can be crisis-inducing, even hazardous to your health. It is indeed “strenuous” but we are talking here about our co-responsibility for the dreadful civilization we sustain by our actions, a problem not for guilt but for greater expectation of joy.
Because liberalism is a totality I need help with my discernment, which is why I need the maverick truth-tellers – to which list I now add philosopher/psychologist William James who found his own non-judgmental way to speak up for religious consciousness as a moral necessity. I need help to see through liberalism’s laissez faire laxity, its best-of-all-possible-world sedation, the cover-ups that keep the spectacle going. The “split” is so important to talk about for the very reason that so few actually traverse the path from child to adult, from being dependent upon the care of others to protecting the vulnerables – the heart of the world – even though the soul calls in every person. The consequences of this refusal of “strenuousness” are all around us in the disheartening conditions of the world that produced Donald Trump. It’s not neoliberal capitalism that’s going down the tubes under Donald Trump, it’s the last shreds of the effort to put a decent face on a system that is barbarous at heart. Which is why I cannot share the shock and dismay, the “this is not my country” expressed by so many liberals who seemingly do not notice the inward split I’m talking about.
But as I see it, what gave the Temenos gatherings the sense of a sacred council fire was just that among us the contrast between “normal shared liberal consciousness” and the outsider-anarchistic soul’s truth was clear. No mistake, Christian fascism is evil. But it does us no good to know that, but not know the completely normalized sedation of liberal reality, its koolaid-induced belief in progress, the faith that keeps everybody locked in to keeping the one project – civilization – going instead of making our own individual lives the stuff of heroism, instead of being slow leavens for a better social order.
For complex reasons, cowardice maybe being one, I never took the Temenos to the “next step” which whatever it was, would have been my venture alone. But, teamed with Orin, the turning point and the desire to serve a this-world good had already led to the Cafe Domenico. This enterprise that took both our energies, that people could see, be enchanted by, patronize and love was surely my calling. During the 21 years of the Cafe’s existence, I knew what I served!
Only now in its aftermath do I see an unintended consequence of this certainty. In running our dream as a business, no matter how anarchist/utopian-inspired, the truth of its mystical origins had to remain underground. Though my soul was in love with the Cafe, her prophetic truth was not allowed its full voice. Even though it was the saint-like idealism that awakened that same love in the souls of others, as the many written and spoken communications to us testify, an avowedly anarchist/utopianist coffeeshop in Utica – or maybe anywhere in the world – would not sell enough coffee to keep its doors open.
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In this time of personal and also national and global stress, my feeling toward the life choices I’ve made in line with my conscience, that deviate so from the “norm,” are always vulnerable to demons of self-negation: The choice to live in this redstate region of NYS, where “public interest” is practically limited to jobs, crime, restaurants, and “heroism” to soldiers and policemen and firemen injured in the line of duty; to resist gadgets and screens; to never follow a career; to live in modified poverty, stranded outside the virtually connected universe – these can so easily be twisted into accusations against myself.
I have to remind myself, it was exactly these choices, including the choice to live in the city, lured by its symbolic meaning as place of inclusivity, change, exchange, of ethnicities and races as well as creative freedom – that brought the Cafe Domenico into existence. The city exemplified the truth of wholeness that includes, rather than denies, the darkness. It was the union of our inclusive souls with Utica’s inclusive soul. It was the funky Utica we could love and relate to. Entirely something of our imagination, helped along by the many “saints” whose words and deeds we had read and admired, many of whose images adorned Cafe walls.
Were these weird choices saint-like? If so, they did not seem to me like asceticism, though in a way they were sacrificial. If saint-like, I confess I’m a wretched backslider of a saint! But also, I must ask as I have always done, is not something like this – i.e, making lifeway choices based upon a different – “heaven-ward-” based model what is asked of those of us who truly long for the better in-common world? I can’t think of anybody I know who thinks the idea of being a saint is a good one! And, while letting go of belief in a moral absolute makes sense compared to the rigidly patriarchal fundamentalist Christian culture portrayed in The Starling Girl, it may be those of us captive in liberal reality are in need precisely of a moral absolute. Ours, however must be the one authorized in mystical, subjective experience that is intrinsically, as William James points out, reconciling and unifying and, I would add, ecstatic.
Giving one’s soul its expression – art-as-prayer, prayer-as-art – places one naturally at odds with the logic of “worldly wisdom” – its divisiveness, hierarchy and rankings, its discounting of human beings and biological/organic life; that is, politically, it pits one profoundly against the lies of dominant neoliberal “reality” with – as Mr. James pointed out – its overweening fear of poverty, its true God, money. But one does not provide the soul its expression in order to be right, which is a move of ego. One does it for the reason each soul calls one to one’s creativity because it is the only way it can express itself. Who am I to obstruct this truth that, for all I will know of God, is God’s truth? And all my soul asks of me are two things, not actually separable: that I serve it by committing to my self-expression (my bliss), and that I “reach out of sight” into darkness, that is, to the root of the chronic unhappiness that is the wounding of the soul, the trauma, denial of which denies the whole soul its truth.
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Sitting in the waiting room of the Boonville medical office last week I was so happy the screen was showing health tips instead of the usual Fox News that I looked up from my book a few times. A quotation from Oscar Wilde came up: “Be yourself: Everyone else is taken.” The sign does not say being yourself is a transgressive act, which Wilde surely knew. It is to be the slow leaven, an anarchist, a Utopian, a new kind of hero. I’d like to think our Temenos is an incubator for this kind of saint, my this-world service perhaps to be mama hen.
The post Service Not Servitude: Be A New Type of Saint appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.
Kim C. Domenico | Radio Free (2025-03-07T06:52:50+00:00) Service Not Servitude: Be A New Type of Saint. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/07/service-not-servitude-be-a-new-type-of-saint/
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