CELEBRITY SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE
My friend Owen Bailey called me up a couple of days ago to say that he had been given $27.67 ticket to a celebrity lecture, actually a dialogue, between a women counselor, Kimberly Ann Johnson, who had a regular podcast and a male spiritual guide, Stephen Jenkinson, who had written a number of books and had a regular podcast. Both of them them had a following and at Kittridge Theater at Warren Wilson College every seat, at $27.16 a ticket, was filled and they were selling the book they were introducing afterwards so there was a good deal of money being made by someone. But they didn‘t talk about money. Neither did I when students were paying a good deal of money to sit in my classes at Warren Wilson when we had class discussions about the meaning of life. I made no effort then to calculate how much each student was paying per session to listen to me because I saw no connection between the meaning of life and money, just as my preacher doesn‘t and just as Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberley Ann Johnson probably don‘t. None of us were guiding people to an understanding of the meaning of life for money. But we couldn‘t do it without getting paid adequately.
In any case, since we are or were all doing a similar thing I have to be cautious in my response to the spiritual guidance I got last night at the on stage discussion at the cost of $27 and the price of a book.
I listened very, very carefully because right from the beginning, although both people were very articulate and the individual words were clear enough and the sound system good, I couldn‘t understand what they were saying. So after ten minutes or so I was wondering as much about why I couldn‘t understand, as about what they were saying. It seemed to me that everyone in the rapt audience knew exactly what they were saying, although when I checked with Owen half way through, he admitted that he didn‘t know what they were talking about either. I was not even sure they were talking to each other or understood each other. Kimberley was emotional and talked about feelings and at one point broke down in tears and at another point almost did. Stephen, although a good story teller, told his stories to illustrate an intellectual point in a very erudite way. Kimberley would ask an emotional question and Stephen would parse the meaning and history of the word she asked about. For example, Kimberley asked about the use of ceremony, I think referring, maybe, to the Burning Man festival in the desert ending with the burning of an effigy which I know nothing about but had a particular meaning to her. And Stephen explained that the word ceremony dated from Roman times and had to do with an imperial power borrowing ceremony from the Greeks because the Romans lacked ceremony and needed to appropriate ceremony from someone else. (If you are lost in my explanation, then you are experiencing what I felt for the 2 1/2 hours of the discussion as the room got colder and colder because someone had apparently turned off the heat.) I never did know what ceremony meant or how it was significant or whether they were talking, even remotely, about the same thing. Which, in retrospect, I also wonder about the students‘ response to me in class.
I have the feeling that Stephen Jenkinson is a very intelligent man who spends a great deal of time by himself figuring out the meaning of his passage through life. Sometimes in answering a question from Kimberley he would be responding to her heart felt question, but sometimes he would use the word as a transition point to something that he had worked out in his head as being very significant and would summarize it quickly with absolute assurance that what he was stating was a fundamental truth, a truth that he was stating in his own precise wording rather than translating it into words that the rest of us could understand and without explaining how he had come to this truth. In Christian terms this would be like assuming transubstantiation or the presence of the trinity or that the wine of communion being the blood of Christ or Christ being both man and God as an absolute obvious truth. A non Christian wouldn‘t know what the heck you were talking about.
Stephen did one other thing that did dislocate me when he went off on a riff about ceremony or competency or the future or freedom in America or the reason for long term care facilities. He would turn the meaning of a commonplace truth upside down so that it would mean the opposite of what we normally think of it as meaning. This made him almost a provocateur. Kimberley would ask about how to achieve competency, and Stephen, without saying she was stupid, would say that of course competency was the root of the problem and that seeking competency was only going to lead you astray. Sometimes Kimberley would then break out into uncontrollable laughter that went on and on amplified by her microphone while Stephen calmly turned her question upside down. He asked about whether she was his friend and Kimberley circled around and finally decided that with his definition of friendship she could not be his friend.
I probably have gotten a lot of this wrong, because as you can see I was having great trouble knowing what they were talking about. But there were several times in their discussion that Stephen would say something that dislocated me and made me wonder. And I have been thinking about these things since the lecture. I will talk about these tomorrow.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 