Wordsworth and Whitehead - ​Spots of Time and Occasions of Experience

​Spots of Time and

Occasions of Experience

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Wordsworth and Whitehead

by Jay McDaniel

​"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

"He would read The Prelude as if it were a Bible, pouring over the meanings of various passages." - Jessie Whitehead about her father*

*as cited by Mary Wyman, "Whitehead's Philosophy of Science in Light of Wordsworth's Poetry," Philosophy of Science (1956) 

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Wordsworth's Spots of Time

"There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence--depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse--our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired."

- William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Twelve

From the earliest iterations of The Prelude, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life. Examples include: walking the streets of London and noticing a blind beggar, or young Wordsworth waiting, in blustery weather, for the horses to take him home for Christmas at the end of the school term — or in one of the most famous examples, even younger Wordsworth riding a pony through the lake district on a windy day and seeing a girl carrying a pitcher of water.

- Adam Roberts, Nov. 24, 2022, Medium

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Occasions of Experience

Why did Whitehead like Wordsworth so much? And why, perhaps especially, did he pour over The Prelude, which is an autobiographical poem of more than 8000 lines.

The poem contains many themes that are important to Whitehead's philosophy.

• The aliveness and spiritual significance of the natural world
• The role that memory plays in providing sustenance for life
• The primacy of experience (feeling) in revealing the concrete facts of nature
• The importance of imagination in meaning making
• The sense of divinity interfused with actuality
• The limits of a merely scientific account of things

​But I suggest that Whitehead turned to Wordsworth, not simply as inspiration for ideas such as these, but for deepening of his perception of lived experience. He knew that Wordsworth's poetry better illuminates the concrete fact of experience than does, say, a scientific theorem or mathematical axiom or, for that matter a philosophical principle. What, then, were the meanings of various passages that Whitehead poured over? They were not simply ideas to be affirmed but also, and more deeply, feelings to be recognized.

I say recognized but I might better say re-cognized, with a dash in the middle. The Prelude is an autobiographical account of Wordsworth's life from childhood to adulthood. The poet remembers past experiences, with special emphasis on relationships, the natural world, and, as he puts it, spots of time. Adam Roberts puts it well: "These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life." In the process of recalling them Wordsworth re-cognizes them, understanding them in a new way. The past experiences become, for Wordsworth, sources of nourishment and renewal: affective sacraments of a kind.

This, I believe, is why Whitehead turned to Wordsworth's The Prelude. The various passages were, for Whitehead, a way of dipping into the river of human feeling, human intuition, and a reclaiming the affective side of life. Later he came to speak of the entire universe as consisting of drops of experience or actual occasions of experience. He suggested that each drop is itself a momentary event, an act of prehending past drops of experience in an affective and emotional way. Wordsworth took Whitehead into the drops. Whitehead cosmologized Wordsworth; Wordsworth humanized Whitehead.

To be sure, some spots of time, some drops of experience, are more intense and important than others. Wordsworth's The Prelude highlights the intense and important ones. But all spots of time, all drops of experience, are part of what makes us human. Even the boring ones, the painful ones, the forgotten ones. The drops are the very building blocks of reality. For Whitehead we don't stand outside the drops of experience; we are the drops of experience, unfolding through time. And so are are quantum events in the depths of an atom and living cells. Even God is a vast ongoing drop of experience. Everywhere we look, within and beyond ourselves, we find spots of time.

- Jay McDaniel

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​Whitehead on Wordsworth​

Wordsworth expresses "the concrete facts of our apprehension."

Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others:

‘Ye Presences of Nature in the sky

And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!

And Souls of lonely places! can I think

A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed

Such ministry, when ye through many a year

Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,

On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,

Impressed upon all forms the characters

Of danger or desire; and thus did make

The surface of the universal earth,

With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,

Work like a sea? . . .’

In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish to make is that we forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height of genius, expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are distorted in the scientific analysis. Is it not possible that the standardised concepts of science are only valid within narrow limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?

​- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

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​About The Prelude

Wordsworth's "The Prelude" is an autobiographical long poem that describes his personal and spiritual growth from childhood to adulthood. It is often considered a seminal work of English Romanticism and is one of the most famous poems in the English language.

The poem spans over 8000 lines. It begins with Wordsworth's childhood experiences in the Lake District of England and his encounters with nature, which he sees as a source of spiritual renewal and inspiration. He then reflects on his experiences at school and his travels in Europe, which help shape his artistic and philosophical ideas.

In the later books, Wordsworth reflects on his struggles with doubt, despair, and political disillusionment, and his eventual return to nature as a source of solace and renewal. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth celebrates the power of imagination, memory, and language, and the transformative power of personal experience.

​

Overall, "The Prelude" is a complex and multi-layered work that explores themes of nature, spirituality, memory, and personal growth. It is a deeply reflective and introspective work that reveals the inner thoughts and feelings of one of the greatest poets of the English language.

​- chatGPT

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The Prelude read Aloud

by the Faculty of English

University of Cambridge

​

The readers include thirteen members of the Faculty of English in Cambridge, including several authorities on Wordsworth such as Prof. Heather Glen and Dr Philip Connell, and on the Romantic poets more generally, such as Dr Mina Gorji and Dr Paul Chirico.

• Book First - Introduction: Childhood and School-time Dr Daniel Wakelin

• Book Second - School-time Continued Prof. Adrian Poole

• Book Third - Residence at Cambridge Prof. Heather Glen

• Book Fourth - Summer VacationProf. Angela Leighton

• Book Sixth - Cambridge and the Alps Prof. Helen Cooper

• Book Seventh - Residence in LondonDr Paul Chirico

• Book Eighth - Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind Dr Mina orji (and the students of Pembroke College)

• Book Ninth - Residence in France Dr Sophie Read

• Book Tenth - Residence in France and French Revolution Dr Eric Griffiths

• Book Eleventh - Imagination, How Impaired and Restored Dr Clive Wilmer

• Book Twelfth - Same Subject (Continued) Dr Christopher Tilmouth

• Book Thirteenth - Conclusion Dr Philip Connell

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​A Scholarly Discussion of

Wordsworth's The Prelude

offered by BBC's In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss

William Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude

BBC "Sounds" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00899w0

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest long poems in the English language – The Prelude. Begun in Northern Germany during the terrible winter of 1798 by a young and dreadfully homesick William Wordsworth, The Prelude was to be his masterpiece - an epic retelling of his own life and the foundation stone of English Romanticism. In language of aching beauty Wordsworth expressed thoughts about memory, identity, nature and experience familiar to anybody who has walked alone among the hills. With Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Stephen Gill, University Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; Emma Mason, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick.

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​Some Passages from The Prelude

• ​"Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, / In a small mill-race severed from his stream, / Made one long bathing of a summer's day; / Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again / Alternate all a summer's day."​

• What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now forever taken from my sight, / Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind."

• "For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity."

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils."

• "The child is father of the man."

• "The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."

• "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!"

• "And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused."

• "A simple child / That lightly draws its breath, / And feels its life in every limb, / What should it know of death?"

• "The earth is all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, / I look about; and should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way."

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​The Influence of Wordsworth

​on Whitehead

by Antoon Braeckman

​

In the "Autobiographical Notes," Whitehead asserts that he was acquainted with Wordsworth before he arrived at the university in 1880. In secondary school he read Wordsworth and Shelley during spare time. This acquaintance with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge becomes apparent through a consideration of the different passages in which they are mentioned. In Principles of Natural Knowledge he cites some lines from Wordsworth (PNK 200); in Process and Reality he quotes Wordsworth’s well-known phrase: "We murder to dissect" (PR 140/212). In Modes of Thought he suggests that he read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. But the most important rendering of the romantic poetry we find in Science and the Modern World. Let us therefore confine our investigation to the latter text, in order to see clearly Whitehead’s view on romantic poetry.

At the end of Chapter V, "The Romantic Reaction," Whitehead summarizes the significance of Romantic poetry: "I have endeavored to make clear . . . that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact." Here, Whitehead stresses the importance of the romantic concept of nature. That concept entails, according to the above quotation, two characteristics: (a) the organic view on nature and (b) the understanding of nature as exhibiting an intrinsic value-character.

Whitehead elucidates the former aspect as a (romantic) reaction against the mechanical, 18th-century scientific view on nature, whereby nature is reduced to mere abstract matter, devoid of any form of subjectivity. As to the latter aspect, Whitehead argues that the English romantic poetry "bears witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values." This means to Whitehead that nature, in the first place, has to do with experience, but above all with the experience of value. Both aspects of the concept of nature in romantic poetry exhibit two dimensions of one and the same intuition namely, that of the fundamentally subjective character of nature. This subjective character has to be understood as the ever-acting ground, involved in any particular instance of nature:

Whitehead’s comment on English poetry in general, and his evaluation of the Wordsworthian poetry more specifically, shows that the most valuable contribution of that poetry consists exactly in this articulation of the concept of nature. This statement can be sustained through a closer study of the similarity in concept, principles, and elaboration of Wordsworth’s and Whitehead’s view on nature.

In Wordsworth we can find the stress on the organic pattern of nature. Moreover, while interpreting its value character, we are impelled to look at nature as an agent to be qualified as subjective. Finally, the concept of an ever-acting ground which is involved in and finds expression through all particular instances of nature allows us to envisage here in nuce Whitehead’s own principle of creativity. Hence, we can conclude that if there has been an influence of Wordsworth on Whitehead at all, it will have to do with his concept of nature. I would even claim -- but this has to be investigated later on -- that the particular synthesis of the concept of nature with aesthetics in Whitehead is almost completely Wordsworthian.

* from Whitehead and German Idealism: A Poetic Heritage by Antoon Braeckman. Braeckman is a Research Assistant at the Catholic University of Leuven, Kortrijk Campus, Sahbelaan, Kortrijk, Belgium. The article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 265-286, Vol. 14, Number 4, Winter, 1985. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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​The Poetry of Philosophy:

Wordsworth’s Poetic Vision

of Nature in Light of Whitehead’s

Cosmological Scheme

Sept. 28, 2012

by ​Matthew David Segall

reposted from Footnotes2Plato

​

The aim of this essay is to read the nature poetry of William Wordsworth in light of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, such that the epistemological and cosmological implications of the former are brought more fully into philosophical view. According to Victor Lowe, it is probable that no other man, save Plato, shaped the imaginative background of Whitehead’s outlook quite as profoundly as Wordsworth.1 This influence makes the task of this short essay far easier, since so much of what Whitehead labored to give clear conceptual expression to in his own work was originally awakened in him by the feeling for the universe that vibrates off the pages of Wordsworth’s poetry. In this sense, the task of this essay is the opposite of Whitehead’s: to translate the basic outlines of his philosophical scheme back into the cosmic visions and archetypal visitations expressed in Wordsworth’s verse.

One of the defining characteristics of Romantic literature is its exaltation of the figure of the philosopher-poet, the one who unveils the way in which, as Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”2 The famous friendship and intimate artistic collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth provides an example of two minds who, while considered alone are great in their own right, considered together as a single mutually formed and imaginatively alloyed soul surely surpass the genius of any claimant of the title philosopher-poet to come before or after. According to Owen Barfield, the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth both “exemplified the contrast” and “deepened the affinity” between the poles of imagination, namely, self )–( world, or again, spirit )–( nature.3 Reconciling these two imaginative forces in one person is all but impossible, since “the finite activity of poetry, like every other motion, still requires a predominance, however slight, of the one pole over the other.”4 Coleridge had a more philosophical bent, tending toward reverential reflection upon the high station of spirit, while Wordsworth was easily charmed by the every day and more sensitive to the living depths of the natural world.Though Coleridge proved himself on occasion capable of penning the sublimest poetry, it could be said that, as a result of his philosophical tutelage, Wordsworth became the greatest of his poetic achievements. Indeed, Whitehead writes of Coleridge that, despite being influential in his own day, when considering “those elements of the thought of the past which stand for all time…[he] is only important by his influence on Wordsworth.”5

Wordsworth is perhaps the most esteemed nature poet in the history of the English language. For Whitehead, he is the chief exemplar of the Romantic reaction against the abstract mechanistic picture of nature fostered by the scientific materialism of the 17th and 18th centuries. He cites the famous line, “We murder to dissect” with qualified approval, agreeing with Wordsworth that “the important facts of nature elude the scientific method” even while he, a mathematical physicist as well as a philosopher, believes the specialized abstractions of natural science need not necessarily leave nature lifeless.6 Science can and should be reformed. Mechanistic science of the sort championed by the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Laplace commits the fatal sin of bifurcating nature, isolating its objective mathematizable aspects by pealing away its sensual and moral layers, layers which found their home in a soul now entirely sealed off from the outside world. Concerning the ethereal hues of a sunset, the sweet fragrance of a primrose, or the melodies of a thrush the poets are all mistaken: from the point of view of scientific materialism, nature is “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”7 Contrary to the general thrust of natural science since its birth in the 17th century, Whitehead’s cosmological scheme is an attempt to systematize Wordsworth’s emphatic witness to the fact that “nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values, and that these values arise from the culmination…of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts.”8 In the jargon of his metaphysics, Whitehead saw in Wordsworth’s poetry “a feeling for nature as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.”9 Hidden within this one short cryptic sentence are the major categories animating Whitehead’s entire cosmological system, including “actual occasions,” “eternal objects,” “internal relations,” and “concrescence.”

Before moving on to unpack Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, it is important to note that his allegiance to Wordsworth and the Romantic reaction is not at all to say that he has sided with subjectivism or idealism over the objectivity of science. The danger in aligning oneself against the mathematical abstractions of mechanistic science is that one rushes too quickly to adopt the opposite extreme, elevating personal emotion and individual will to such unwarranted heights that the entirety of the visible universe is made to seem a private projection, a mere appearance dependent upon the constructive activity of my mind. Wordsworth’s absorption in living nature–“an inmate of this active universe,”10 as he put it–all but inoculated him against this subjectivist over-reaction; but there are a few occasions when Wordsworth seems almost to become infected by other strains of the Romantic bloodstream, especially those emerging in the orbit of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Whitehead strongly positioned himself in opposition to Kantian, Fichtean, and Hegelian forms of idealism which can be read as attempting to derive the concrete and contingent existence of the universe from the abstract universal categories of thought.11 Not incidentally (considering the influence of Schelling on Wordsworth through the intermediary of Coleridge), the relationship of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is far more congenial, since unlike for Kant and Hegel, for Schelling “Nature is a priori.”12 Whitehead pithily suggests that his approach “aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.”13 In Kant’s first critique, experience is either translatable into conscious rational knowledge (Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas/representations” of geometrical space and time), or it is no experience at all. The vague but overriding feelings of nature’s creative rhythms and physical purposes always scintillating along the fractal horizons of consciousness are ignored in order to secure the certain knowledge of the rational, waking ego.14 The abyssal complexities of our aesthetic encounter with the sublime are left for the 3rd critique, the Critique of Judgment, but even here, where Kant’s powers reach their highest pitch, he pulls up short of the erotic receptivity that may have reconnected him with the animate intelligence of the cosmos. In book XI of The Prelude, as if speaking directly to Kant, Wordsworth pays homage to the “animation and…deeper sway” of nature’s soul while warning against the “narrow estimates of things” resulting from rational critique: “suffice it here/To hint that danger cannot but attend/Upon a Function rather proud to be/The enemy of falsehood, than the friend/Of truth, to sit in judgment than to feel.”15

While for Kant, “the world emerges from the subject,” for Whitehead, “the subject emerges from the world.”16 Whitehead’s conception of subjectivity is such that the order and meaning of our experience is originally given to us by the order and meaning of the surrounding actual universe. “[The subject] is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it.”17 Whitehead’s object-to-subject account of the formation of experience may seem too strict a rule for Wordsworth’s imaginative epistemology to obey, since for the latter the senses must be free to half-create and half perceive the world, as he suggests in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798). This reversal of the vector of experience may at times prove to be a true tension in the two men’s outlooks, a tension worth untangling if only to discover a deeper commonality.

It would be an unfair reading of Whitehead, based on his reaction to much of German idealism, to neglect the extent to which his epistemology is fully awake to the creative and participatory role of the imagination in evaluating and synthesizing the facts of the actually existing world. His criticisms of idealistic accounts of perception result primarily from the mistaken prioritization of a derivative mode of perception, “presentational immediacy” over the truly primitive mode, “causal efficacy.” Presentational immediacy is a highly advanced form of experience available to conscious human beings. Dominated by the eyes (“The most despotic of our senses”18), it gives us a certain degree of reflective distance from the causal flow of cosmic vectors of inter-bodily emotion. These vectors, felt through the more original mode of perception, causal efficacy, generate the “mysterious presence of surrounding things”19: for example, the “voluntary power instinct” of the brooding Cliff that made the young Wordsworth’s hands tremble while rowing back to shore in his stolen skiff.20 Without the enlivening passion of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy becomes a fallen mode of perception, detached and cut off from intimacy with nature, her inner life reduced to the external relations of dead objects floating in outer space. Without the reflective disinterest of presentational immediacy, causal efficacy would swallow up our consciousness into the “dim and undetermin’d sense/Of unknown modes of being” that haunted Wordsworth for days after he returned the skiff to its mooring-place.21 Whitehead describes a third, hybrid mode of perception called “symbolic reference,” which plays a role akin to the synthesizing imagination, able to skillfully interweave physical prehensions with mental conceptions in order to produce heightened forms of aesthetic enjoyment and moral appetition. In Whitehead’s jargon, mental conceptions are also prehensions, or feelings, but instead of feeling concrete matters of fact, they feel eternal objects, or abstract forms of possibility. Whereas causal efficacy is “the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present,” presentational immediacy is the “[projection which] exhibits the contemporary world in its spatial relations.”22 Through the mixed perceptual mode of symbolic reference, habits of imagination are gradually acquired which bring forth the taken for granted world of every day experience.23 It is the synthesizing activity of this mode that Wordsworth refers to when he writes of how “The mind of Man is fram’d even like the breath/And harmony of music. There is a dark/Invisible workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, and makes them move/In one society.”24 A skillful poet is able to consciously moderate the synthetic activity of symbolic reference, “to keep/In wholesome separation the two natures,/The one that feels [causal efficacy], the other that observes [presentational immediacy].”25

It would be a superficial reading of Wordsworth to ignore the degree to which he wavers in his assigning of precedence to either the mental or physical poles of experiential reality. Just a line below his statement in Tintern Abbey about the creative element in perception, he writes of being “well pleased to recognize/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being.” He finds that his mind is not only necessarily tied to his sensual encounters with nature (as it is for Kant), but that the language of sense has birthed and raised to maturity even the purest of his ideas from out of the womb of nature herself. Elsewhere, Wordsworth writes of the way a mountain range “By influence habitual to the mind/…shapes/The measure and the prospect of the soul.”26 Further conforming to Whitehead’s object-to-subject reading of the vector of experience, he writes: “From nature doth emotion come, and moods/…are nature’s gift.”27 But it could still be asked: is Wordsworth speaking here in a psychological or in an ontological register?

Whitehead’s characterization of Wordsworth’s poetry as exhibiting a sensitivity to the interpenetrating “prehensive unities” of nature, “each suffused with modal presences of others,” is meant to classify him as an ontologically committed panpsychist. His poetry is overflowing with hymns to the Anima Mundi, with references to the “the Life/ of the great whole,” and to the way “every natural form, rock, fruit or flower/…Lay bedded in a quickening soul.”28 Even here, however, just as Wordsworth appears to fully confirm his cosmological orientation, the tension of the poles of spirit and nature begin vibrating, as if hovering in superposition. Does Wordsworth mean that all these natural forms lay bedded in his quickening soul? In the same lines from The Prelude cited above, he could be read as congratulating himself for rousing nature from her sleep: “To every natural form…/I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,/Or linked them to some feeling…/…all/That I beheld respired with inward meaning.”29 But just a few lines later, Wordsworth again reverses the vector of his experience back from the idealistic to the cosmological pole, finding his mind “as wakeful” to the changing face of nature “as waters are/To the sky’s motion,” becoming to her activity as “obedient as a lute/That waits upon the touches of the wind.”30 Perhaps Wordsworth’s tendency to waver on this issue betrays one of the key differences between a visionary poet, focused on capturing the vividness of each fading moment, and a systematic philosopher, focused on characterizing the ultimate generalities characterizing all experience.

Though it is beyond the scope of the present essay, many parallels could also be drawn between Whitehead’s conception of a dipolar divinity and Wordsworth’s visions of the World Soul, “the Imagination of the whole.” Briefly, like all other actual occasions, Whitehead’s God has two poles, an intellectual/mental and an emotional/physical. Unlike all other actual occasions, God’s primordial pole is intellectual rather than physical, consisting in an evaluative ordering of all eternal objects. This ordering serves to condition the unfolding of the universe by making relevant novelties available to the concrescence of each finite occasion of experience. These finite occasions are free to make their own decisions and evaluations, but these decisions are made amidst the set of possibilities provided by the wisdom of God. Through God’s consequent pole, the creative becoming of the physical world is taken back up into divine experience as through a loving embrace to be harmonized with God’s primordial nature. To quote Whitehead at length: “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”31 The everlasting pulsations of divine concrescence are the macrocosmic analogy of Wordsworth’s autobiographical journey from childhood paradise, through the impairment and on to the final restoration of Imagination. “From love, for here/Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,/All truth and beauty, from pervading love,/That gone, we are as dust.”32

Footnotes

1 Understanding Whitehead (1962), 257.

2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819).

3 What Coleridge Thought (1971), 90.

4 WCT, 90.

5 Science and the Modern World (1925), 79.

6 SMW, 79-80.

7 SMW, 55.

8 SMW, 84.

9 SMW, 80.

10 The Prelude (1805/1970), 27.

11 Process and Reality (1929/1979), 89.

12 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799/2004), 198. Nature here is natura naturans, the generative abyss from which all finite form arises and into which it dies; this is akin to Whitehead’s category of ultimate generality at the base of all actuality, Creativity.

13 PR, 172.

14 Modes of Thought (1938/1966), p. 74-75.

15 The Prelude, 209.

16 PR, 172.

17 PR, 113.

18 The Prelude, 210.

19 SMW, 80.

20 The Prelude, 12.

21 The Prelude, 12.

22 Symbolism (1927/1955), 50.

23 UW, 184.

24 The Prelude, 10.

25 The Prelude, 238.

26 The Prelude, 125.

27 The Prelude, 218.

28 The Prelude, 37.

29 The Prelude, 37. Italics are mine.

30 The Prelude, 37-38.

31 PR, 525.

32 The Prelude, 233.

R.E. Slater - A Country Idyll (prose)

A Country Idyll

(prose)

by R.E. Slater

Today is one of those really cold wintry days in Michigan where time is a given and outdoor adventures are kept to a minimum unless you have the proper warm flannelled clothes, heavy coat, thick boots, hat, and scarf, and the personal ability to endure the cold and actually enjoy it.

Myself, though I am growing old, I still love winter, its wonder, solitude, silence, and ferocity. The worse it gets the more I love it. In childhood if there was a raging blizzard blowing and drifting outside I and my brother were in the "teeth of it" as we sledded down our tall hills to then scramble up them, then down, again-and-again until we tired.

And when not sliding we were testing our "daring do" abilities by jumping into deep snowdrifts nineteen feet down trying to hit bottom (we never did) to see if we could scale back up them or fight our way out of their massif miens. But do not worry, those hillside drifts were skinny, more tall than wide. Four feet at best, sometimes more.

Across our hills lay the old 150-year-old barn where the winds would gather to crest the frozen fence lines and blow across the hill tops ringing the wetland below. There, on the hills or up at the barn we could expect 25 to 30 feet of snowdrift four to six foot deep blown lengthwise and down the contour of the hills. When younger we built very long luge runs bored like tunnels through the bottoms of the drifts. And within their interiors we built one and two-person snow rooms from early morning until late at night when the bunny rabbits hopped about, and we could watch them like gophers from our dens. Later, when older, we learned how to "bust through their tops" with a snowmobile gunning the engine straight up the big hills, then slamming the drift front-on, trying to carry 30 or so feet of air before landing on the downward side of the sloped hill.

We had a lot of fun during the winters. Dad would plow the drives and stack large snow piles by the dilapidated chicken coop or barn and as the plowed snow grew higher and higher in height and girth we waited and waited until pulling out the iron shovel-spades from nearby garage, began carving out our own majestic snow castle; or play king-on-the-hill like we did at school, to be pushed down rolling all the way to the bottom of the massive snow pile.

And on icy days when not using our Radio Flyer metal-runner sleds on the hills, we would glide across the flat icy fields steering around tufted island of wild grasses where the snow gave in and stopped our fun. Sometimes we ran a hundred feet and sometimes we never stopped until we reached the icicled fence lines. It was a lot of fun.

And then there were the holidays of Christmas and forced winter school closures where we waxed luxuriant to play board games through the morning till bored then bundled up to visit our grand old grandma next door bereft of granddad back when we were too young to understand.

She would watch us slide down her chimney's "coal shute" built into the house as an anchorage to the outer chimney; or make labyrinthine mazes with our booted feet, scooting across the crusty snow working around-and-around or, in-and-out, then play catch-me-tag as we scampered about the maze trying to catch one another.

When cold, we would fly into the old farmhouse's back "work room" or "ready room" where dad, his brothers and sisters, and my uncles and aunts five generations back, would gather to dress for the fields and dairy barns; or undress and clean up after a long day of farming and husbandry.

Most days, we flew in to warm up our little bodies. Which delighted grandma no end. We would peel off our wet outer clothes and iced-up buckle boots to be lured within to Graham Crackers and milk as we explored again the old house with its framed pictures and family rooms.

And on special days when coming indoors we might find grandma working about two very large, vat-like, and rounded laundry tubs filled with steaming hot water rising about her fragile frame and filling the ready-room with much need heat. There we would watch with child-like eyes grandma move about the tubs stirring the wet clothes in the hot waters or winding them through a sturdy pre-1930s hand wringer before clothes pinning all to a strung line about the clapboard room.

She always gave a wry, toothy smile from her diminutive figure clad in thin gingham dress before measuring ourselves to her frame shoulder to shoulder to see if we might be as tall as she! By age ten we had caught up with our beloved "second mom" before scampering down the cement floor hall to a back anteroom where an inside - and importantly, an unfrozen hand pump served up the best of coldest waters in a speckled blue enameled tin cup.

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it...

And if our busy dad wasn't on the roads policing or, up at the fire barns cleaning up the ash soot of the fire equipment and trucks after a fire, or driving our school bus morning and afternoon, we might find him up at cold barn in the dark of night servicing the plow tractor so it would be ready for use. He would add oil, gas, grease, check the tire chains, and always place a trickle charger on the battery to keep it in good health on cold nights.

Looking around the night-filled blackened barn lay hundred-year whatnot and older, inexplicable, paraphernalia. The kind of stuff you see in Midwest antique stores. To us, it was junk, much used, and never removed by the hands that had placed it there years and years and years ago. There it lay with thick dust upon it underneath a mouldy atmosphere of age.

While dad worked, we would climb up a rickety wooden rung ladder nailed into the beams which rose above the iron implements of plow, disk or tractor, thirty feet into the air, then fling upon a heavy 3' X 3'-foot double planked door to gain entry into the loft. Within, what once held hay now held more disused antiques. On summer days the space was filled with floating/wafting dust motes... but in the black, only the shafts of light from the dim bulb below gained entry through the upper planked floor.

One especially good memory I have is that on the worst of the winter storms or summer gales, I would brave the elements to gain the barn, squeeze through between the jammed tractor doors, and sit in the loft above listening to the old barn groan and moan telling me of its hoary memories as I might imagine them from the dissolute litter lying about me.

In my mid-twenties I sadly tore down the old wood barn. We were selling all our homesteaded acreage as all my relatives were dying or too old to keep the farm with their day jobs. We had already sold the old sixty-foot Quonset steel barn which held the dairy herd below under heavy planked floor. It had been disassembled and rebuilt north of us on an active pig farm. Forty years later I was blessed to walk within its structure at the consent of the owner who had torn it down, and with my cousin and wife, we fell silent and simply listened to the movement of the old iron beams swaying and creaking for a while. It was the finest of symphonies to our humble hearts and ears.

As I took down my heritage, I first removed the attached-and-slated corn crib then proceeded to remove the ancient, boarded siding and overlapping ribs. Dad wanted all the old nails removed and bucketed, which took some time. Once stripped of naked of cladding I next tried to undowel the 6/8" wooden tendon pins and the massive 14/16" beam pins to no avail. Worse, I could see all the work down 150 years ago by my ancestor who had hand-adzed each beam across the length of all four of its sides. This was truly a labor I did not like nor one I had wished to do.

Watching, my dad and his brother (my uncle) suggested pulling down the structure with the old tractor. It was an old, rusted Farmall M that had been well cared for and never spent one night outside in the rain or snow. We strapped a length of chains to the back frame of the tractor then commenced tugging-and-pulling 8 of the 12 main upright beams holding everything up: Imagine walking alongside a broken, tottering structure to attach chains to several corner and side beams... we left the interior beams alone of course.

One by one we broke the bottoms of the grand, noble, upright beams, until the whole skeleton finally gave in along with the falling tinned plated roof. In our moment of glory, we each found a deep sadness which comes from living too long. I have grieved for years over the loss of our pioneered land, our farm buildings, my grandparents, and the many overwhelming memories of family and friends working the fields and gardens together, picnicking, hunting, or playing baseball on the hay fields.

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it...

To grant homage to the pre-industrial, agrarian pioneering days of yesteryear, I was listening one winter day in early December to my schoolteacher read to me in second of third grade the wintry idyll, Snowbound, by John Greenleaf Whittier. As I sat at my old fold-top desk listening to the verse's tones and lights I felt a deep, inner affinity for the words and imagery being read.

Here, as my own generations had done for many years, in this simple one-room school built 150 years ago by my ancestors; where I walked every morning and mid-afternoon across the hay and grain fields, and dairy pastures; climbing up-and-over the boxed-wired rotting fence posts and lines; or drawing through the barbed-wired and rusted post fence lines; grudgingly wading through wet morning dews of field clover with my lunchbox in one hand and books in the other; where my pants, thin socks, and worn shoes took all morning to dry; here, I fell in love with a well-scripted verse by a poet I never knew. And though I have tried my own hand at this written art I realize it is only for the gifted few who have the muse and verve within the souls which might spill their words across the gilded page welling-up deeply held, visceral feelings we thought had long died within us long ago.

So, here, at the start of January's dark wintry days and blacker, moonless nights, is a poem you may, or may not like. But at the poetry site I am directing you too, you may find other poems to explore, read, muse, or share.

To all wintry travellers seeking a warm fire to sit by,

and a soft light to read by in socked feet and flannel shirt,

of versed dreams remembering yesteryear's youth,

or loss loves and refound fortitudes...

enjoy these seldom moments of distant memory

dulled by the intervening years of a lived life....

- re slater

R.E. Slater

January 16, 2024

John Greenleaf Whittier - Snowbound, A Winter Idyl

Process Theology, ​Death, and Grieving

From Jay McDaniel's Open Horizons Website:

Process Theology,

​Death, and Grieving

springboards for discussion

The Journey of Grief (Patricia Adams Farmer)

Creative Transformation and Grief (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)

All the Little Deaths: Whitehead on Perpetual Perishing (AN Whitehead)

The Metaphysics of Grief: Unexpected Wholeness (Jay McDaniel)

The Desire to Preserve (digital story by Maureen Mollinax)

Objective and Subjective Immortality (Robert Mellert)

Falling Leaves (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The Naturalness of Death (Rabbi Bradley Artson)

​David Ray Griffin: Life After Death is Natural, Too

A Ship Sails On: Subjective Immortality (poem by Henry Van Dyke)

Yes: Death is Natural and the Journey Continues (Jay McDaniel)

​

​The Journey of Grief

by Patricia Adams Farmer

My mother died. Those three words are hard to write, let alone process. For me, the finality of never hearing my mother’s voice again or having the chance to talk over old issues or discover something new about her childhood—are all swallowed up in a black hole of mystery that is beyond me now. Game’s up. No more chances. It feels kind of brutal and unfair.

But she was elderly and ready to go and died peacefully in the night, the way we all wish to go. So I did not anticipate any earth-shaking emotions. How wrong I was! A parent’s passing under any condition is never anything but earth-shaking.

Who was I to know that a whole plethora of feelings would suddenly rise up like a chaotic music video filled with intense images and colors and rhythms, a kind of hodgepodge of noisy regrets and bittersweet memories and intense sadness and forgotten angers and irrational bouts of guilt.

I would prefer to turn off the whole grief experience, or at least decide how it goes.

But that’s the weird thing about grief: it just does its thing regardless of our preferences. While I would prefer a quiet, gentle Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings kind of grief experience, I get rap instead. The quiet sadness is punctuated by the rude and repetitive bursts of “If Onlys” and “Should haves.” So, for me, grief at this point in the journey is a jumble, a mashup of emotional tonalities that have a mind of their own.

This lack of control is, in itself, discomforting.

Richard Rohr defines suffering as "whenever you are not in control." Mourning our loved ones feels like this, a humbling of all our attempts at control. We hear, too, the ancient whisper in our ears: Memento Mori (Remember, you shall die.) Just as death comes when it comes, so the grief process is something we cannot control. But we can be partners with it. And herein lies the good news.

Grief is a journey, I think, a road trip into unknown territory, with a mélange of ever-changing feelings as traveling companions. So yes, that includes the negative emotions, too. As for my own road trip, I’ve got my regrets rapping in the backseat, pelting out words that grate and disturb and cover up the orchestral strings I’m playing on the radio. I can tell the backseat regret-rappers to shut up, but they can’t hear me for all their shouting, “If only, If only” and “You should have, You should have” in maddening repetition to a beat which gives me a headache. I wish I could dump them on the side of the road and speed off with tires screeching; but alas, for the grief journey to work, I must make room for them and offer them a little compassion. So I muster my patience: Okay, you guys, I’ll listen for a little while and then you really do need to shut up.

But my other traveling companions—gratitude and forgiveness and loving memories—get to sit in the front seat and read the map and choose the radio station. I can work with these guys. I’m not sure where we’re going, but I just keep driving because it feels like the thing to do because movement helps. I want to be open and engaged to whatever healing might emerge in the journey.**

Mourning can be a kind of creative, open-ended movement toward transformation, that is if we are willing to let all our feelings ride along with us in honesty and acceptance. My friend, theologian and pastor Bruce Epperly, affirms this in a beautifully honest passage from his book, From Here to Eternity: Preparing for the Next Adventure. He describes his own experience of finding his brother dead. How shocking that must have been! As his friend, I know that Bruce’s dedicated care for his brother was evident to all who knew him. Still, his journey of grief included these honest feelings:

“I still vividly recall finding my brother’s lifeless body in the mobile home we purchased for him in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I still go over our relationship, lamenting missed opportunities to be more supportive of him in facing the challenges of mental illness and loneliness. I had been a supportive brother, yet I still experience a sense of guilt at sins of omission that might—although in reality probably wouldn’t—have made a difference in his quality of life.”

I found great relief in this story because it reminds me that regret and guilt—irrational though they may be—are universal, perfectly normal in times of grief, not something cooked up just for me. They are part of the journey.

And the journey is hard.

But the journey can also take us to places we didn’t even know were on the map—unexpected landscapes of mystery and awe and beauty. This happened to me. Although I was not present at my mother’s death, I was told that shortly before Mother passed in the wee hours, her hospice roommate heard her talking to someone, but no one was there. My mother spoke these words into the darkness: “Okay, Mother, you can come in now.” She died shortly after.

It was as if her own mother—long passed—had been standing at the door of another existence with outstretched arms, so eager to usher her daughter into the loving embrace of eternity!

This news touched me deeply, jolting me out of myself. I quickly changed gears and drove my car named Grief, packed with a motley crew of emotions, up to a high peak. There, overlooking the unfathomable ocean of eternity, I paused and looked into that Great Mystery with humility and awe, contemplating the hope of connection and healing and reunion and further adventure inside the heart of God’s embracing love.

I like to think of death as a widening of the soul, like spreading wings, where the self is not extinguished but rather enlarged: a spectacular transformation which breaks through the walls of the chrysalis-like ego, ushering us into a spacious, interconnected, transcendent Beauty. Perhaps, then, death itself is the Great Journey.

As my friend Bruce says, in Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed,“The God who was present in the energy of conception is equally present at the moment of death, luring us forward as God has done from the beginning toward the next adventure in partnership with God and the world.”

My present adventure, this journey in grief—chock full of ever-changing emotions—is just beginning, but I know it will continue to transform me and teach me about love and life and eternity. Just as heaven, in my mind, enlarges the contours of our souls in relational healing, so grief will stretch my earthly soul with its new landscapes carved out of sorrow and beauty. And I will learn something of my own mortality, too, and of savoring wild flowers and sunny days. Perhaps, then, I can snatch glimpses of heaven, and of that Great Love that embraces us in life and death.

​

Perhaps, when the time comes, my own mother will be waiting at the door, eager and ready to usher me into that “next adventure.”

​I hope so.

​**The metaphor of the "road trip" used in this essay was inspired by writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who used a similar idea in her wonderful book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, as a way of understanding fear in the creative journey.

​Creative Transformation and Grief

​Land

Directed by Robin Wright

​

A soulful and empowering portrait of grief.

A film review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Reposted from Spirituality and Practice​

"Grief and pain are dreadful, and to live free from them is to be truly blessed. But the truth is, we usually have no choice when it comes to loss. Eventually, it visits every one of us. And there is no magic or blessing that is found in this curse. There is no cosmic trick. But there is a different approach to facing our suffering — one that can lead not only to respite and relief from our pain and anguish, but also to an unexpected sort of wholeness." These wise words come to us from Matthew Gewirtz, the Senior Rabbi of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in his book The Gift of Grief. They capture the essence of this simple yet deeply felt film.

In her feature directing debut Robin Wright plays Edee, a depressed woman who is carrying a heavy burden of grief and pain. Being around people only adds to her anguish and so she purchases a ramshackle cabin in the mountains of Wyoming. She stocks up on supplies and gets rid of her rental car, U-Haul, and cell phone. Although she has unobstructed views of the majestic mountains, she doesn't have time to really enjoy the place. Instead she finds herself busy doing repairs on the cabin, chopping wood for the stove, and lugging water from a local river. When a bear wrecks havoc on her possessions and food stocks, she is devastated.

As the seasons pass by, Edee is troubled by apparitions of her dead husband and son. Her unrelenting grief has a dire cumulative effect on her body and she suffers a physical breakdown. She is brought back into the land of the living by Miguel (Demian Bichir), a local hunter. When she regains consciousness, she asks him, "Why are you helping me?" He responds, "You were in my path."

​

Miguel is a healing presence in Edee's shattered life and so he listens carefully when she says, "I'm here in this place because I don't want to be around people." With empathy and insight, he tells her, "Only a person who has never been hungry thinks that starving is a good way to die."

Since she refuses to go to the hospital, he nurses her back to health and teaches her how to trap and hunt. A quiet and pensive man, his favorite song is "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." Miguel's jaunty manner of singing amuses Edee. In a very touching way these two souls, who have both been wounded by loss, reveal their secrets and, in so doing, empower each other. He helps her with her chief aspiration: "I want to notice everything around me more."

​

This emotionally engaging film confirms what all the spiritual traditions teach: there is no rigid pattern in grief's stages and phases. It also shows us how the experience of loss brings us into a direct and often painful encounter with the fragility of the body, the poisons that suck the life out of us, and the isolation which often keeps us from accepting the kindness, compassion, and restorative gifts of others.

All the Little Deaths

Whitehead on Perpetual Perishing

and how it may not be the whole story

​"The ultimate evil. . . .lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing.’ Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story."

Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, ed. Griffin & Sherburne, New York: The Free Press, 1978, 340)

​The Metaphysics of Grief:

Unexpected Wholeness

​The many become one and are increased by one.

- AN Whitehead

At every moment of our lives, the past actual world becomes one in the immediacy of the present. So say the process philosophers and theologians. The past actual world consists of remembered events, persons, and circumstances that have passed away: friends and family members, landscapes and waterways, feelings and stories, soundscapes and moods, places and poems. Everything that has been, in any mode of having been, is part of the many that becomer one in our immediate experience, through our memories of them.

These memories can be concious or unconscious, or somewhere in between. The things that are remembered can be part of our own personal past (the personal unconcious) or part of a more collective past (the collective unconscious). We can remember historical events that we were not a part of, for example, but that are important to us: a war, a natural disaster, a loss of life, the decline of a way of living, the loss of a language, a culture, a species, a biotic community.

Our memories of these past actualities, whether conscious or unconscious, are clothed by moods and emotions. Process philosophers and theologians call them "subjective forms." Other people may not be able to see them directly, but they can feel them through our present actions: the smile, the frown, the furrowed brow, the laugh, the gleam in the eye, or the sadness. These subjective forms are how we feel (or prehend) the past. They are our emotions.

One such emotion, immensely complex, is grief. This grief can be about a trauma we or someone we love has undergone, or about a loss in life: a death, a misfortune, a disease, a sadness. We grieve it. We wish it had not happened, and we can't quite get over the fact that it did.

An Unexpected Sort of Wholeness

Amid our grief, say the process philosophers and theologies, there is something else happening in our experience. We carry within ourselves, moment by moment, a 'creativity' by which we interpret and respond to what has happened, seeking to weave it into the rest of our experience in a constructive way, as best we can. The past has a say, but not a final say, because how we interpret it adds to the history of our own life and the future. The many become one and are increased by one.

Additionally, amid this interpretive act, there is also a possibility for creative transformation: that is, for emergence in our own life of something new and beautiful in its own way. Rabbi Matthew Gewirtz, the Senior Rabbi of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, calls it an unexpected sort of wholeness:

"Grief and pain are dreadful, and to live free from them is to be truly blessed. But the truth is, we usually have no choice when it comes to loss. Eventually, it visits every one of us. And there is no magic or blessing that is found in this curse. There is no cosmic trick. But there is a different approach to facing our suffering — one that can lead not only to respite and relief from our pain and anguish, but also to an unexpected sort of wholeness."

​This possibility for creative transformation, for an unexpected wholeness, does not change the past, but it does affect the future. For process philosophers and theologians, the possibiliy of this unexpected wholeness come from the universe, not just from us; and, more specifically, it comes from the living unity of the universe that many address as "God." If the universe is imagined as an embryo, then this living unity is the sky-like Womb in whom the embryo unfolds, moment by moment. The Womb is not all-powerful; it requires our participation for its aims to be realized. And yet is it all-loving, all whole-making, all redemptive, all tender. Indeed, it is also, in its way, a companion to our grief and suffering: "a fellow sufferer who understands."

- Jay McDaniel, August 7, 2021

The Need to Preserve:

​The Pain of Loss

A story about cooking from scratch, the passing of a food maker, and a family left behind. This story was made in a workshop facilitated by the Center for Digital Storytelling. It illustrates a kind of grief in which God shares, even if no wholeness emerges from it.

​Objective and Subjective Immortality

excerpts from What is Process Theology

by Robert Mellert: Chapter 11: Immortality

The perishing of an actual occasion, therefore, need not be its extinction. Rather, it can be understood as a kind of switching of modes. Whereas in the emerging of an actual occasion God’s immanence is felt in the incorporation of value, in its perishing that actual occasion is felt immanently in God as a fuller realization of the divinity. In this way the occasion continues to be felt in the formation of the future. Death, then, is emphatically not a passing into nothingness. Instead, it is immanent incorporation into God, in whom each actuality is experienced everlastingly for its own uniqueness and individuality. In dying, one "gets out of the way" of the present in order to be available to the future in a new way.

Does this doctrine of immortality, which Whitehead calls "objective immortality," correspond to the faith expectations of those who seek the reassurance of an afterlife, a place of eternal happiness, or a heaven? In some fundamental ways, at least, I think that it does. The basis for their belief is the impossibility of man’s conceiving of himself as not being. The one absolute and certain experience that endures throughout his entire life is the experience of being in the present, recalling the past, and anticipating a future. One experiences a profound continuity with oneself in space and time.

​

*

One can also argue for the possibility of "subjective immortality" using the thought of Whitehead.2 In this interpretation the series of actual occasions that constitutes the continuity of the self is not interrupted or terminated by death; it only changes the environment in which it does its experiencing. The ordinary environment for the experiencing self is the body. However, there is no necessary reason why the series of actual occasions that constitutes the self cannot continue in some other non-material environment. Hence, death can be understood as the detachment of that dominant series of actual occasions we recognize as the self from the many supportive material series which constitute the human body. The new environment is the consequent nature of God, where the serial reality of the self continues to experience and to change, but without any direct attachment to the material world.

- Robert Mellert, What is Process Theology?

​Falling Leaves

​​Spring and Fall

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

​

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

The Naturalness of Death

To Dust You Shall Return: Our Alienation from Death and the World

by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson

Looking through the window of my synagogue study, I enjoy a vista of a dense, tree-covered, sloping hill and valley that my suburban community has preserved as green space. Still sporting the wild plants that originally graced it, that valley and hill ground me in the larger purpose of my work—consciously living with the reality of God's creation, cultivating gratitude in the Creator of all this teeming life, and guiding others to understand their spiritual place, both as people and as Jews. I take great comfort in that view, because it elicits—through good times and bad—the majesty, richness and continuity of life. The occasional sighting of a mother coyote with her twin pups reminds me that we are less distant from other living things than we might like to assume, and that simply being in the world connects us to something vast and beautiful.

From that same window, past the hills to the nearby road, I occasionally spot the mutilated bodies of possums, cats, and birds struck by the cars that race by with such reckless haste. Adjacent to the lush, thriving vegetation, the concrete straight-jacket of our transportation—a resource that makes much of our living possible—regularly claims the lives of the denizens of the woods. Life and death, woods and pavement jostle side-by-side, linked in a dance in which each player takes its turn, in which no one partner can hope to dominate forever. Life, then death, then life, then death follow each other in a cycle, sketching a pattern greater than any individual can ever hope to transcend.

As a rabbi, I'm used to watching that cycle flow by. Funerals, b'nai mitzvahs, baby namings, hospital visits, and ritual circumcisions form the web and woof of my calendar. During Torah readings, the very basis of Jewish living, we pray for the sick, recall the dead, bless newlyweds and name new generations of babies. As with the view from my study, so too the view from the sanctuary: life and death, biology and culture, nature and artifice are intertwined in our religion, as they are in life.

My congregational life throws me into the thick of life's tangles, making all moments of the life cycle contemporaneous and inseparable. An awareness of life's vastness and relentlessness is nothing new: I've driven from a funeral to a brit milah and finished the day with a wedding party followed by a Shiva minyan. Life, before my eyes, parades whole and haphazardly. I imagine it must look that way to God, too. But, it is only recently that I have noticed my panorama, begun to consider its implications, to read the world, as it were. Only recently, immersing myself in the literature of environmental ethics, have I begun to see the trees for the forest, for all forests. Only recently have I opened myself to feeling my place in creation as a religious act, as a source for knowing God in a deeper, more nuanced way.

That new way has led to an unanticipated connection between the way our culture denies death (and hence cowers in paralyzing fear of it) and the way we also blind ourself to creation (and hence are terrified—and contemptuous—of the realities of life on the planet Earth). I believe that our obsession with denying both death and planetary considerations, the pretense that we live forever and that we can use the world's riches in any way we please, emerges from the same underlying insecurity and responds to a particularly human shallowness that threatens both the quality of life and our ability to function unimpaired in the world.

Permit me a rabbinic illustration: many of my adult congregants report that they have never been to a funeral, even well into mid-life. As a society, we have so successfully quarantined death from life that one can reach forty without personally seeing a casket or comforting a mourner. Most congregants don't want to think about the inevitability of death, which means that most refuse to make any preparations in advance (which, in turn, means that the bereaved are forced to focus on some gruesome business decisions during the time of their sharpest grief).

While Jews—along with other Americans—routinely distance themselves from death and dying, Judaism, as a religion, has always insisted on an intimacy between the living and the dead that would shock many moderns. Jewish law insists that the dying are not to be left alone, that no one should have to die without their loved ones and community on hand every step of the way. The corpse is to be bathed and clothed by members of that community (generally volunteers), and burial is traditionally quick and simple: dressed in a shroud, the remains of the dead are buried directly into the ground, without coffin, without flowers, without anything interfering in the return of the body to the earth. Mourners are to escort the remains to graveside, and the immediate family and friends consider it an act of love, a privilege, to bury their loved one themselves. A Jew, having died, is to be embraced by the earth and the community at the same time, in a harmonious partnership between creation and covenant. The God of Torah is also the Source of Life.

That integration is no longer the norm. In fact, in many places it isn't even a possibility. The primary factor for many funeral parlors is the condition of the lawn (itself an unnatural import in most locales). In order to preserve the surreal quality of cemetery lawns, bodies are not only placed inside coffins, but those coffins are then lowered into almost air-tight cement boxes. When I first started working as a rabbi, the funeral homes often used what they called a bell liner—a concrete cover shaped like a bell that simply fit over the casket. While its primary purpose was to prevent the collapse of the grave with the passage of time, at least the bell liner allowed direct contact between the earth and the casket. Increasingly, however, the funeral directors use a two-piece concrete box that resembles nothing more than a giant shoe box. The bottom piece rests in the grave before lowering the coffin into it, and the top—conveyed by crane—settles heavily above the casket after the mourners have already left. That way they don't have to witness the final indignity—their loved one's remains are hermetically sealed inside walls of concrete forever: the final deception.

At the last funeral I performed, just after a cleansing rain that left the skies crystal blue and the ground sated and damp, I asked the funeral director why they used this new concrete box instead of the bell liner. I was told that "most families don't want to see the casket lowered in water." Fear of death and separation from creation coalesced in a burial that precluded the reunification of earthly remains with the earth, shattering the comfort that might have come from knowing that this death would lead to new life, that this body would provide the basis for new life and new beginnings.

Our fear of death and our desire to disguise it has created something truly terrifying. Our blindness to creation and its rhythms has produced a practice unnatural and unnerving. Even in death, a wall of concrete now blocks our loved ones from a more wholesome unity with the Earth and with life's regeneration and resurrection.

Both our panic and our audacity spring from the same source, just as insecurity is often the lurking motivation of the bully. We humans, terrified to recognize our own dependency, our own creatureliness, bully the world with our swaggering denial of death, with our supposed freedom to dominate the world and all it contains. But our bravado rings false. Just as the brutality of the bully only re-imposes a terrible loneliness and a self-fulfilling sense of being misunderstood, our futile manipulation of nature and our desperate attempts to deny death can only deepen our misery, our isolation, and the very dependency we sought to avoid in the first place.

Are we trapped, then, within an ever-accelerating cycle of fleeing our fears/pretensions and being further enmeshed by them? Is there no alternative to our alienation from our natures and all nature?

Denying reality will never provide us comfort. Instead, the intrusion of the inevitable keeps us in need of an ever more powerful and desperate illusion, one which must fail in its turn as well. As our illusions languish in succession, the realities underlying our fears only grow more gripping and implacable.

Rather than denying reality, an effort doomed from the start, a more fruitful approach would suggest opening ourselves to the possibility of beginning with reality and grounding ourselves (literally and ideologically) within the fertile soil of God's creation. Instead of shielding ourselves from death, we can understand the end of physical existence as an intrinsic part of life, one with value for ourselves, our progeny, and our planet. Rather than shutting ourselves behind walls of concrete, or living our lives behind walls of any kind, we can open ourselves to the world in which we live, the one from which we borrow and to which we must, inevitably return.

Life, larger and more encompassing than any particular expression of living, than any one embodiment of its vitality, is a process that connects us to each other, to past and future, and to all created things. It is primal, it eludes both thought and word, it transcends language and culture. Its sheer energy, force, and drive are both terrifying and liberating. We take up the very elements that had been used to sustain earlier living things, and some day relinquish our hold on those resources so that new life may flourish in its time. Our willingness to propagate and our love for the generations yet to come impels a willingness to mortality, to providing the resources to sustain the young lives we love, in whom we see our hopes, our dreams and salvation.

The very scope of life is shattering. Yet, in being overwhelmed, we are also liberated from the horrible burden of assuming control of a universe beyond our grasp, of a domination that enslaves us and endangers us even as it seduces us into greater extremes and terror.

We cannot control the world, try as we already have. We cannot govern the cosmos, making decisions of life and death, of necessity and value, when so much of the complexity of life and its interrelationships eludes our understanding and snares us in the very web we seek to weave. In asserting a false control, like a fly seeking to escape a spider, our ever more desperate remedies fling us closer and closer to our end. In our growing danger, our rising panic prevents the patience, the calm so necessary for vision, perspective, and comfort.

Where can we look, then, for our help? To whom can we turn for that broader vision and timeless perspective?

If we start by acknowledging our embeddedness in creation and our dependence on the Creator, we may hope to abandon our futile attempts to master the world through coercive manipulation or brute force. Einstein taught us that the position of the viewer alters what is viewed; that we are, ourselves, within creation. His insight cautions us against the deception of mastering creation, since our efforts must simultaneously shift the complex equations and surroundings that control our very lives.

Because we cannot step outside of life to view it from a neutral place, because there is no external base on which to place the fulcrum to lift the world, our first reality (and our last) is one of belonging, of symbiosis. We are the world, at least in part. We reflect the divine image of God, but we do so as creatures, not as gods. Whatever comfort may be ours must issue from that recognition, from that humble sense of place.

Admitting God as our Creator and the Creator of all, allows us—as partners with God in maintaining creation and as creatures fashioned by God to live in the world—to be ourselves: to seek more realistic and modest goals with which to establish meaning in our lives and significance for our deeds.

We can rise to our potential if we recognize that our mandate is but to maintain and to shepherd God's creation. Just as the Torah and Jewish law only authorizes doctors to heal and to comfort, so humanity, as the physicians of creation, work authentically and faithfully when we sustain the functioning of a system too complex to master and too beautiful to control. Our success is to be measured by how well we can care for the least among us and for the world in which we live. We succeed when we maintain community or establish a new fellowship, a communion with those who we previously rejected as "other" or as "outside."

Death loses some of its sting if our more modest sense of self displaces the arrogant delusion of being essential, of omnipotence: I do, indeed, need the world and humanity, but they do not need me. I need creation as the garden in which to exult, to grow, to play, work, struggle, learn, and sing. As a part of creation, there is a sense in which creation needs me—but only to the degree that I am a willing participant of that creation. Once I separate myself from the world, once I sever my embeddedness in creation, than I set myself up against it and creation no longer needs me. I make myself an alien, requiring the reinforcement of concrete to hold my delusions in place.

A religious vision of the world—as God's handiwork—and of humanity—as God's caretakers and the physicians of creation—allows us to transcend our crippling fear of death and our deadly alienation from creation. We are a part of the world, not apart from it, and our lives are the shimmering waves of an endless sea. We flow from it, and return to it, and in that cycle of tide and tow, of ebb and flow, we leave a mark precisely to the degree that the sea continues, unimpeded, on its way.

​We die to new life, for new life. And in death we are embraced by the earth, and by God, if we but have the courage to open our arms.

​

David Ray Griffin:

Life After Death is Natural, Too

Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality

by David Ray Griffin

​In this book, David Ray Griffin, best known for his work on the problem of evil, turns his attention to the even more controversial topic of parapsychology. Griffin examines why scientists, philosophers, and theologians have held parapsychology in disdain and argues that neither a priori philosophical attacks nor wholesale rejection of the evidence can withstand scrutiny. After articulating a constructive postmodern philosophy that allows the parapsychological evidence to be taken seriously. Griffin examines this evidence extensively. He identifies four types of repeatable phenomena that suggest the reality of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Then, on the basis of a nondualistic distinction between mind and brain, which makes the idea of life after death conceivable, he examines five types of evidence for the reality of life after death: messages from mediums; apparitions; cases of the possession type; cases of the reincarnation type; and out-of-body experiences. His philosophical and empirical examinations of these phenomena suggest that they provide support for a postmodern spirituality that overcomes the thinness of modern religion without returning to supernaturalism. --- From The Publisher.

​A Ship Sails On:

An Image of Subjective Immortality

I Am Standing Upon The Seashore

I am standing upon the seashore.

A ship at my side spreads her white

sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.

I stand and watch her until at length

she hangs like a speck of white cloud

just where the sea and sky come

to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;

"There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

​

Gone from my sight. That is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull

and spar as she was when she left my side

and she is just as able to bear her

load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone

at my side says, "There, she is gone!"

There are other eyes watching her coming,

and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;

"Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

Yes

Can we, as humans, accept the naturalness of death, as Rabbi Artson recommends, and also trust in a continuing journey for each and all, as Henry Van Dyke's poem encourages? And can we honor the process of grieving, as Patricia Adams Farmer so beautifully describes, while also recognizing that sometimes, amid the process, an unexpected wholenes emerges? Can we accept the big deaths in life, and also all the little ones, as factual and irreversible, as Whitehead suggests; while also recognizing that each moment of life, each little death, offers a value that transcends the perishing? Can we mourn the loss of old ways of living, with honesty, and also trust in the possibility of new ways? Can we accept that death is natural, along with Rabbi Artson and that a continuing journey after death is natural, too? Are we able to live with this kind of depth? This kind of complexity? This kind of honesty? This kind of rationality? This kind of faith? Process theology suggests that, all things considered, the answer to all of these questions is Yes.

​- Jay McDaniel, August 7, 2021