Category Archives: Universality

From the Moon, together, we can see it…

September 17, 2009 · 6:20 am

The American Scholar – Decline of the English Department

Having read The American Scholar for probably over thirty years, I could only feel the most seething contempt for the Autumn 2009 article by William M. Chace, “The Decline of the English Department: How it happened and what could be done to reverse it.”

I found myself repeatedly thinking while reading it, is this all you can come up with? What do you expect? The American English department is thoroughly sunk in doctrinaire nihilism and cynicism, as are all of the humanities, indeed, modern culture. We don’t believe there’s any value, meaning, or purpose to life. Who in their right mind would want to spend their lives studying the idiocies that the humanities have given themselves to over the last decades? I didn’t in the 1980s when I found myself subjected to bumbling fools prating about Derrida and the End of Everything, while composition “specialists” were busy draining off, in their own way, anything worthwhile to write about. Clearly fewer and fewer young people are interested. Good for them. There’s hope after all. Unfortunately, that leaves most of them grossly illiterate and nescient about human civilization. But that’s what you ultimately get when you have coercion of conscience by tutors, clerks….

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

On the American English department, also see my post For All Humanity.

Frederick Glaysher

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August 11, 2009 · 6:20 am

Westminster Abbey Evensong

England

England

Westminster Abbey Evensong

“Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.” Acts 14.22

While visiting England for ten days at the end of July, 2009, I attended Evensong with my wife in London at Westminster Abbey. For an American it’s a rare experience to be in a building, let alone a cathedral, that’s over a thousand years old. In Michigan there’s little that extends back before the 1860s to1880s. Yet much of our trip included pilgrimage, as it were, to one ancient site after another, central to civilization and English literature, and several other buildings three to five hundred years old. The time scale itself is fascinating, humbling, elevating. Rising heavenward into vaulted ceilings, the columns of Westminster Abbey ascend. Prayer in stone and song resound from the quire. Hearts reach towards God. Thanksgiving beyond the murmuring of words.

In Japan and China, I had been in many temples, pagodas, and other religious sites that were several hundred years old and older. Westminister Abbey, dedicated in 1065 AD,  was the first experience I’ve had of Western sacred ground of comparable antiquity and worth. There are some poets entombed and memorialized in the southern transept.

Having reread the Book of Acts and the writings of St. Paul and the other apostles, prior to setting off for England, along with a lifetime of reading English literature and history, I felt prepared and fortified for the journey. Life as it is lived, on the ground, on planet earth, always plays a crucial role in one’s education.

Frederick Glaysher

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June 9, 2009 · 5:38 am

Pray to your Father

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

Pray to Your Father

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Matthew, 6.6

I was very young when I first read these words of Christ. I knew they were true, felt them deeply, as I still do. They guided me the right  way, when much else was often in doubt. They guide me now too. They teach humbleness and sincerity before God, closing the door to the distractions of the  world, communion with Him alone. All the prophets and teachers of the great religions, including  Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha, similarly extol prayer and meditation. The guidance and example of the Bahai prayers deepened, strengthened, opened my soul to the Divine.

In times when we are lost, the best thing we can do is follow Christ’s teaching, withdraw into prayer, find our way through worship of the Divine Essence, the peace and stillness found in surrender to the Mystery of Being; await there for the still, small voice to pick us up and lead aright. As Plato wrote, first a shudder, and then the old awe pours over one.

Rereading this spring the four Gospels, I savor again transcendence and its vision of spiritual and moral perfection, the surest guide, down to earth, while reaching to the stars.

Frederick Glaysher

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November 24, 2008 · 5:38 am

World Bible. Religions of Man.

The Moon

The Moon

It was as a young student in high school that I first encountered the scriptures of other peoples, in a class on world religions, which used The Portable World Bible. Instead of historicism, I believe I got the real message, since I did the reading, of the writings themselves, the universalism at their core. And it may have been that I was fortunate in the teacher of the class, who may have introduced me to a new style and way of manhood. Looking back, I see an intellectual man, more sophisticated and nuanced in sensibility.

And then, a year or two later, after more and wider reading, I took a college class that included Huston Smith’s The Religions of Man. That book opened new vistas, ordered things in a new way for me, even as I couldn’t really relate to the instructor, dropping the course before the end. But I had the book. And read it.  And re-read it. It was true to my experience. For soon, I had “gone off hiking into Baha’i.” But it was not “too quickly” of a decision. I had spent a few years reading and thinking about virtually every Baha’i book that had been published up until that time, 1976. I searched through several libraries from the suburbs to downtown Detroit to find them, and thought and prayed, prayed and thought, while continuing to read widely in the poets and literature.

It was more than a decade later that I heard of Joseph Campbell, through Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth on PBS, another powerful influence, one I immediately recognized as true to my experience, re-watching it many times, reading some of his books. By 1982, while I was still in Japan, I had already begun to make notes for The Parliament of Poets. Campbell’s work was startlingly congruent with where I already found myself to be, confirmed me in the direction I would take. But it wasn’t until about 1993 that I had written down, perhaps, I think now, as a result of his interview with Moyers, where I would travel.

Frederick Glaysher

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