Sean Reagan

This morning I watched two tufted titmice in the maple tree at the bedroom window. They sipped from icicles on limbs that nearly reached the porch roof which is still laden with snow from recent storms. They were quick and alert, the way it sometimes feels to be happy.

They reminded me of the summer before law school and how obsessed with birds I suddenly became. I had left Vermont to live in a city close to the law school. I was lost and confused, unsure of where ambition had led me. In response I read deeply and obsessively about birds, hiked alone up and down the Seven Sisters, canoed miles of the Connecticut River between Sunderland and Northampton, sat for hours in Forest Park, all with binoculars, guidebooks and notepads.

The idea became that there was a hole in me that only birds could fill. Every time I saw a bird, the void that was so much of my being, that I pictured as a sort of hungry blackness, would fill a little. It was as if the birds were made of light. Each feathery ray illuminating me by degrees, staving off collapse.

Of course I would say it differently today. Birds – like maple trees, like children, like rivers – frame the void, which is utterly impersonal. The shape of anything is the shape of the cosmos, and that to which we give attention is already attending us, for we too are objects, living frames through which the universe spills.

For a long time I called that understanding – and its occasional embodied manifestations – holy, which was a way of making it a special private accomplishment. I regret that, of course. The desire to hoard anything as a way of excluding others from sharing it is unloving. It hurts, and the pain is not ours alone.

One learns, one does.

The tufted titmice, though. They also reminded me of how earlier last week – before Lent began – I had felt unexpectedly very close to Jesus, somewhat the way I felt in Vermont before leaving for law school. In those days, in Vermont, I wrote poems and songs and rarely spoke to anyone other than Jesus, the cardinal exception being public librarians who helped me track down obscure articles and out-of-print books. My study was the Lord and the liberation from sin proclaimed by his son. Its fruit was a dizzy sense of proximity and intimacy with Christ.

It was the same last week. If I spoke, Jesus answered. Whatever worried me, Jesus reminded me he would cover it. It was like being wrapped in a weighted blanket all day, angels murmuring pacifying hymns at all hours. I liked it. I suspected it would pass but while it lingered, I liked it.

And pass it did, slowly eclipsed by my ongoing reading, teaching, writing and house-and-homestead chores. It was good that it passed. It was. The work now is not easy and there are no guides, no maps, and no easy outs. Fellow travelers, yes. Way stations, yes. A deep sense of it-will-all-work-out, yes. But guides and maps, no. Not anymore.

And that, really, finally, was the point of this morning’s titmice. They reminded me of that period that came after that year or so of dialogic intimacy with Jesus, a period in which a vast emptiness arose in me, one that declined to be filled with familiar narratives, scriptural exegesis, institutional ritual and pre-meditated meditations.

The birds forced me into the world in a rough but focused way. Look for us, they cried. Know us better, they sang. They forced me into a relationship with attention that for all its studiousness was never not yoked to the world. The birds forced me to attend. They called me to a vivid praxis that was unexpected and confusing. Bird-watching? Really?

And yet that praxis sustained me through those early confusing years of law school, the crazy academic pressure and competition, the living in a city, the abiding uncertainty about lawyering as a career. Really, until I settled in with Chrisoula, and we moved back to Vermont and – in our stumbling way – into the homesteading life that is our (yet shaky) fundament, that bird-centered praxis was what breathed me.

What I mean to say – chirpy avian that I sometimes am – is that we do not always know the form our requisite praxis will take. Today, on the fifth day of Lent, 2019, it took the shape of two tufted titmice, these sentences and, threaded throughout, a sense that you were listening, noticing, attending, bringing me forth in love.

By asking “what shall I do?” or “how shall I do something, anything at all?” I am displacing praxis with more study. And this is the move that I want to see myself making. Not to stop myself or correct myself but simply to see it. Not as a matter of what is right or what is wrong but what is.

Of course, the distinction between praxis and study is artificial, or rather, is contrary to their fundamental unity, which is apparent (inherent) in how they are given.

In order to make distinctions, I must have already bought into (brought forth) the idea of value – that is, the idea that a thing can have value at all, and thus can have more or less value than some other thing.

Value is a concept that forces one to distinguish and this can be seen because no sooner do I make the distinction (between, say, praxis and study) then I prefer one to the other (study to praxis).

Playfully, it is study which indicates that this happens and also suggests that maybe it shouldn’t happen, at least not unintentionally, at least not without being noticed. So praxis is the subject of study, and in that sense precedes (or is distinguished from) it.

And so the quest for praxis as such is not coherent, because an effective and meaningful praxis was there all along, revealed by the very study which it had brought into being (which, in turn, brought it into being).

(The web becomes quite tangled, almost as if we are begging to be ensnared and even consumed by the one who builds the web).

So perhaps I could reframe the whole thing and say that it is not a question of being praxical, but rather being differently praxical, intentionally praxical.

That is, it is better to live a life inspired by Catholic Worker values than a life inspired by publicly mulling over one’s thinking about Catholic Worker values.

That is, go feed the hungry! Rather than think about feeding the hungry.

(Wittgenstein said, look, don’t think).

But that, too, assigns value to a distinction, which is not the new or fresh praxis contemplated by the evolution of study, this new or fresh juncture it has reached (or suggests it has reached, perhaps simply to call attention to itself yet again, for is this not how study always flirts, always insisting that it – not application – be the subject of one’s attention).

One might way then: don’t fall for the illusion of right action; don’t fall for the pretense that the self is undone in that action which secretly validates the self. Just keep writing and reading and doing what’s in front of you. Let the spiritual chips fall where they may, which they always do anyway. Just breathe. Let others breathe, too.

If the hungry need food then they will find us, or find someone else, and then  someone else – with some other form of hunger – will find us. Aren’t we all going forward with hands outstretched, palms to the heavens?

Well, what finds us today – on this fourth day of Lent 2019, at 3 a.m. in the morning – is wordiness, the play that longs to clarify itself in communion with others for whom play – this play – also has value.

Yet this writing – which is thinking out loud – implies a division between praxis and study, which negates – or occludes, maybe – their unity, which is actually how they are given.

It is not sufficient to say that study is praxical and praxis studious. That reflects a distinction subsequent to their appearance which is always undivided.

For example, we typically don’t look at a river and its banks as a unity. We see river or banks. Yet absent one, the other cannot exist. The shape of one is the shape of the other. Given attention, their mutuality eventually blurs. Unity emerges. But it is the unity that was always there.

What other praxis is there but to give attention to all our living in order that the many instances of mutuality might blur and oneness appear? Or reappear maybe, slowly but resolutely, like the horses some mornings when they come up from the far end of the pasture hidden in mist. Their heavy footfall first, then faint outlines as if the mist were assuming equine form, and then the horses themselves, the mist falling away into the background.

We do not discover the world. We do not detect it. The world arises with us: we bring it forth, including the body whose senses bring it forth, whose senses coagulate around certain forms of lexical identity (I, we, you, Sean . . . ). All of this is given; all of this just appears. However we describe it – or explain it, if we can – our description and explanation are momentary, always eclipsed by the ongoing giving.

Husserl indicated the possibility of an “absolute radicalism” which for him implied one’s submission to a decision “which will make of one’s life an absolutely devoted life.”

This is a decision through which the subject becomes self-determining, and even rigourously so – to the very depths of his personality – committed to what is best in itself in the universal realm of intellectual values and committed, for his entire life-time, to the idea of the supreme Good . . . the subject chooses [supreme knowledge] as his veritable ‘vocation’, for which he decides and is decided once for all, to which he is absolutely devoted as a practical ego.

We give attention, perceiving the distinctions of thought and language arising, and we bracket them in order to attend the ongoing givenness of the world. It becomes our practice, our praxis, and our experience enlarges and intensifies, as if to indicate not a finite self removed from the cosmos in order to observe some sliver, but the cosmos itself in grand continuous and luminous self-regard.

This is a new way of being, this attentiveness which has no primary subject or object, but is bent only on encountering itself over and over in the ecstatic spilling of living as love. It negates nothing – not the errors that kept it from awareness once upon a time and not the stories that would slip the brackets and throw reins on a wild throat. It is light itself, love itself, the ordinary transforming itself into All.

I say (for it is not precisely what Husserl says, nor what the many Husserlian interpreters whose insight and clarity exceed my own by many factors say) give attention to the unity that is never not giving itself to you in the very form of the living that your living assumes.

Anyway, that is a way of thinking about it, for one who is tired after a long day of teaching and reading, and who wants to think about it, on this, the third day of Lent, 2019.

In a sense, praxis has to do with the exercise – with the application – of ethics and morals. Through study we develop an intuitive sense of what is good and just, what is most likely to defuse conflict and elevate the collective, the all-of-us, rather than only the individual. Through praxis we seek means by which to bring these ideals to real fruition.

“Real fruition” is a problematic phrase, though. What is unreal? For that matter, what is real?

Let’s say that I reach a conclusion that A is better of when B is better off. In general, this does strike me as practically unassailable wisdom. A world in which all people made this their singular ideal when choosing how to act would be happy, peaceful and creative. I would like to live in that world; I believe it is worth my effort and attention to try and bring that world forth.

If I simply go about my living meditating on the satisfaction of a scholarship that arrived soundly at “A is better off when B is better off” and I don’t make a deliberate effort to bring it into application, and to help others bring it into application, is that enough?

If I only say “A is better off when B is better off” but then vote for local policies which ensure B will not be better off, or treat my students differently than I would like to be treated, or treat my wife or children in ways that I would not consent to be treated . . .

I think that is incoherent.

So we could say that “what is real” is what allows for a sense of coherence in our experience. The theory, as such, has an embodied correlative. Whatever the world is, it is that in and through which theory is enacted.

A sage ACIM student – a generation older than me, who had broken bread with Tara Singh and Ken Wapnick and who studied as well with Krishnamurti – years ago ended a sustained dialogue with me because I would not renounce Tara Singh’s use of the word “application.”

That is, Tara Singh often emphasized the importance of bringing our study of ACIM into application. He developed the Joseph Plan of A Course in Miracles for the Lean Years; he literally fed the poor as a staple of his ACIM practice. This meant a lot to me; it resonated deeply and in a sustained way with my longstanding interests in the Catholic Worker and other radical approaches to hospitality, peace-making, dialogue and learning.

My friend believed – and his point was not without merit, not at all – that Singh had been confused and never found a way out of his confusion. Service unto others sounds good but it was actually a distraction from the radical nondualism A Course in Miracles envisioned. One doesn’t apply anything because the world is not real and neither is the self.

But I suggest – carefully, hopefully respectfully – that real and unreal are an unhelpful binary and that the world is merely what appears, and that within that world response also appears, and these appearances and responses are structured and lawful, and so in that experiential matrix, it can be practical and helpful to think in terms of “application.”

Maybe.

I suggest that praxis – integrated with devout study, arising from and informing that study in turn – is not only possible but necessary. That it cannot be separated from the appearing and responding but is part and parcel – warp and woof  – of the welter.

My old friend said, “Sean, you have a lot to learn.” Nothing since suggests that he was wrong.

But of course all of this is simply prattling about praxis, rather than being praxical, and so does not answer the fundamental question: how shall I bring forth love today?

This was written on the second day of Lent, 2019.