In the last post I referenced Herman Hesse. This writer whom I have only read in translation has often been for me a starting point in search of spark to motivate my spiritual growth. I never read his biography, save for the end piece in one of the novels, (it may have been in Knulp). Still it is clear from his choice of words and the structure of his various stories that he was a seeker. Hesse’s writing seems to be his personal pursuit of truths fictionalized.

Sometimes Hesse's vision led him to dark places as in Beneath the Wheel, but sometimes you could sense the joy he felt at allowing his characters the opportunity to learn how to live. I think Narcicus and Goldmund was my favorite of his tomes. That volume is one perhaps that I should go back and reread. (At the very minimum it would stop me from blogging for a time and people would probably appreciate that.) As I remember it, the gist of the story was that two youths, friends after a fashion, traveled very different paths in life seeking their salvation. One of the two was very earthy and worldly (whoring, drinking, life of the artist stuff-all occurring in the midst of the plague) and the other was very focused on God and the church. As the years drew on their paths touched on several occasions.

I think there was an important internal conflict in the soul of the worldlier one as he attempted to carve a beautiful piece of woodwork for the church. What I drew from the story was something implied in the ending, that each person's path to salvation must be worked out by them alone and no two paths are identical. I also think there was a real feeling that passing judgment on others in this realm of toil and tears is not to be undertaken lightly. It may not be a task that those of us who have to live in this corporeal world have the talent for.

In addition to Hesse as I contemplate the spiritual search I have often found my way to Mayeroff and Merton. Here are a couple of quotes that I have gone back to again and again in correspondence. Merton comes first.

What is wrong with my life is not so much a matter of sin, but a matter of unawareness, lostness, slackness, relaxation, dissipation of desire, lack of courage and decision, so that I let myself be carried along and dictated to by an alien movement. The current is of a world that I know is not mine. I am always being diverted into a way that is not my way, and is not going where I am called to go. And only if I go where I am supposed to go can I be of any use to anyone.

There is only one thing to live for: love. What pains me so on these days of recollection is to see my own soul so full of movement and the shadows and vanities, cross-currents of dry wind stirring up the dust and rubbish of desire. I don't expect to avoid this humiliation in my life, but when will I become cleaner, more simple, more loving? Have mercy on me O God.

An odd piece but it is writing with great resonance. At the time I originally toyed with this bit of prose that is now becoming a blog entry I was turning fifty. At that moment I had been five years in my job, and I was pondering the choices I had made or had deferred in life. The lapse of two years has introduced two surgeries into my realm of experience, one for cancer and the other for an appendectomy. Both hurt physically but the former is always at the edge of my consciousness My one year follow up comes this month.

As I was then, I remain now deep in thought about how to live the appropriate (maybe ethical would be the better term) life. To my mind this is how it should be, I am not big on accepting the status quo as okay. Sleepwalking through life is not a good thing for anyone.

Another quote this one from Mayeroff follows. Sometimes it seems the people who have the most to say about life’s meaning are those with a central focus on love (and caring).

Hope is not an expression of the insufficiency of the present in comparison with the sufficiency of a hoped for future; it is rather an expression of the plenitude (or fullness) of the present, a present alive with the sense of the possible.

Mayeroff, On Caring, pp. 25-26

The questions I have been asking myself of and about life don't have any easy answers. Maybe they don't have any answers. Maybe they have multiple answers all correct or maybe even all wrong. The key is the questioning, questioning everything even things assumed to be beyond question.