On the second night, instead of a seder, I will share a less-structured meal with friends. During the Passover week, the food we eat will be free of chametz—leavened foods, symbolic of whatever is puffed-up with pride or ego or clogged with resistance in our own selves and societies. And the spiritual nourishment we consume will be meditation and the sharing of teachings on freedom. So I’ve been thinking about what I have to say on the subject.

I’ve just returned from a week or so of traveling, giving talks and taking part in meetings with colleagues across the country. It’s been a hugely interesting and satisfying experience for me, because the messages I’ve been carrying, about defining and asserting an expansive public interest in art and culture, have seemed to be what people now need to hear. It feels wonderful to be told that my work is inspiring. Counteracting the temptation to become puffed-up with it isn’t too hard, because I know there is a long distance to travel between the message that ignites desire for change and actualizing the change one desires.

Have you ever looked at a map of the small-scale territory the escaped slaves traversed in their forty-year journey to the promised land? “Running around in circles” would not be much of an exaggeration. One teaching that makes great sense to me is that it was necessary to delay their arrival until the generation imbued with slave-consciousness had died out, so that upon attaining a place where it was possible to live in liberty, their descendants would be capable of acting as free people.

On Passover, we are asked to retell the story of liberation as if we had ourselves escaped from Mitzrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt, which is very near to the word for “straits” or “narrow places.” The outward Exodus is seen to symbolize the inner journey out of whatever binds and pinches, whatever holds us back from the realization of our potential, from the exercise of our freedom.

For some time now, when I am called upon to give a talk or write an essay, I have been challenging myself to unzip any feeling of constraint to speak my own truth in my own voice. This has been a remarkable experience for me: many times, I have anticipated that what I have to say will trigger passionate opposition, the kind that shuts people’s ears. Of course, it’s not as if the whole world agrees with me; reasonable people hold all sorts of views. But the more I have allowed myself to express a coherence of inner and outer realities, the more I have showed up as myself, the more people have opened in generosity to what I have to say.

This is an important lesson to me, that the greatest impediment to internal freedom is an outer shell, a persona that fits too tightly, that pinches in important places, with the result that you find yourself speaking words, taking actions, offering gestures which you know to be false. Of course, the world invites this, constantly. If someone approaches me after a talk, on the one hand offering a positive response, and on the other hand seeking agreement with a particular viewpoint, the temptation to nod and say yes is extremely powerful. It takes conscious choice to stop and consider, to condition a response on an inner sense of truth, and to risk making someone who has just said something very nice to me reconsider whether he or she really means it.

Since the topic of many of these conversations is politics, I seem to be involved in a perpetual (if informal) survey of the regard in which my fellow artists and activists hold the actually existing exemplars of our democratic system. It will be unsurprising that the most common criticism of politicians is the false personae so many of them wear, the way they clothe their messages in coded words and concepts that conceal their true nature. To the extent that we believe the system to be conditioned on lies, democracy is always in peril.

Seeking the freedom that amounts to congruence between inner and outer realities doesn’t guarantee that one’s positions will be coherent or true or right by any particular standard. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in his great 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” “Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.” But they will be freely chosen, which matters a great deal.

This freedom we are given to reject the constraints that keep our essence and persona from coming into alignment and focus is both social and personal. We are coping with daunting economic, social, cultural, and environmental injustice in this country. Yet still, because we can preserve Constitutional freedoms with our intentions and actions, because we can seek and stand up for human rights and the obligations they entail—still, despite formidable countervailing forces, to a remarkable extent, we have the scope to exercise our liberty in freely chosen outward actions.

It’s the inner imposition that still seems most powerful. It amazes me how often I hear people whose work is the expression and communication of deep knowledge—artists, teachers, spiritual leaders—say that they cannot be themselves, they cannot speak their truth, they cannot reveal their feelings, because they feel constrained by others’ expectations. To be sure, there are plenty of rules we must all follow: consideration for our fellow human beings’ feelings, no “Fire!” in crowded places, and so on. But it remains true that censorship is the element of public policy most fully decentralized in this country. So many of us self-censor in anticipation of disapproval that mostly, the inner Pharaoh does the job: there is no need for the heavy hand of the state.

So whether or not you celebrate Passover, please accept my blessings for a season of liberation, the kind that allows all of us to slough off the carapace of a constricting persona, the freedom to choose our own words and actions, and the obligation to demand the same of those who hold our democracy in trust.

One of my strongest desires is help potentiate a paradigm shift in which things like artistic creativity and justice tempered by love move to the center of our social concerns, instead of remaining out on the margins where they’ve been pushed by the mechanistic, materialistic force that has dominated for far too long. Pursuing that desire, I generate essays, talks, workshops, letters, teachings, polemics, parables, and often, these resonate with the people who receive them.

But resonance doesn’t always initialize action. Even when something has the ring of truth, a countervailing force—a powerful inertia—may impede our will to act on it. It’s expressed in different ways:

“I don’t see anyone in Congress who’s going to sponsor a new WPA right now.“

“Yeah, the old healthcare system isn’t working, but people aren’t going to to change; they’re just too comfortable, too lazy, too easily fooled.“

“Teaching to the tests is poisoning the next generation’s education, but all Washington understands is metrics and optics, so what are you going to do?“

“The entire financial system needs an overhaul or the country is going down. But Wall Street will block it, and people are too stupid or too complacent to make it happen despite their objections.“

All of them add up to the same recipe: the fear of alignment with a lost cause, of failing or looking foolish; the irrational conviction that we know the future and it’s against us; anger and resentment at indifference to injustice; all of that baked into a pièce de résistance that keeps us from trying—thus fulfilling the proposition that trying isn’t worth the effort.

The biggest obstacle to progress I encounter, in myself and others, is a immobilizing disappointment. And every day, I see something more clearly. While we can’t know that our efforts will bring the desired results, this much is clear: the longer we postpone the sustained work of shifting the culture toward humane values because the odds are against us, the longer we will wait for the change to begin.

Everything happening in the external world of politics and culture has its correlate in the little world of the individual and family, of course. Through a quirk of the Hebrew calendar, even though the secular dates are weeks apart, this has been a week of yahrtzeits: the anniversary of my father’s death 53 year ago last Saturday; and of my mother’s death in 1999 today.

There are many people who endured much worse childhoods than mine, who grew up in war zones or detention camps or orphanages, sustaining unimaginable abuse. But my household of social and economic marginality, petty crime, ruthless self-preservation—suffice it to say that when I tell the tale, the unfailing response is surprise, the kind you’d reserve for a child with excellent table-manners who just happened to be raised by wolves.

This year, I suppose because I am at such a crossroads in life, the anniversaries hit me hard. I have been easily activated into anger or despair. It has been easy to tip the stream of my thoughts onto a rocky course, where I see myself as singled out for punishment. Along the stream, familiar objects float and bob: the feeling from childhood that I am being used; my identification with distorted ideas, such as the certainty that what I want will never come to pass. I keep hauling myself out of the water, reminding myself that old feelings are dragging me along, getting snagged on new situations. What with toggling back and forth between the limbic system and the neocortex—between emotional activation and rational thought—my brain in getting a big workout, and it is tiring.

Yesterday, a wise friend told me to look at the sense of entitlement, the narcissism, that was feeding the system. Since I prefer to see myself as an altruist, I didn’t much like the view. “You think because you’ve suffered and worked hard and want it so much,” my friend said, “you should have it. But why? Where is that written?“

My friend reminded me how important it is to break the chain between wanting and the expectation of getting. “Hold your desire. Get up every day and make your best offering. Then surrender. It’s out of your hands.“

I am familiar with the teaching that desire is suffering, but for me, it isn’t true. It’s not the wanting, but the conviction that desire should be fulfilled that brings pain. History is full of lost causes. Some stopped being lost and became real changes. Sometimes it happened in a surprising, tectonic shift, sometimes the change came by almost imperceptible degrees. But when such change arrives, it is always in the company of people who didn’t give up on what they knew just because the odds were against them, people who weren’t afraid to want and work, whether or not their wanting was fulfilled.

Surrendering feels like a big relief. I don’t entirely trust my ability to remember that, but I’m guessing life will provide abundant reminders. And along the way, I hope to get up each day, make my best offering, beam my desire into the world like a homing beacon, and tune out the tyranny of the instantly achievable. Desire, offering, surrender.

“Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”

Stew, Passing Strange

I discovered this week that I have become a member of a religion I used to reject: the Church of Art. (I’m guessing you clocked this before I did.)

I discovered it during the swooning spiritual experience of watching the DVD of Passing Strange, the uniquely beautiful and rich musical story of the musician Stew’s coming of age, as an artist and a man, a journey that took him from a two-story home with all the mod cons in L.A., through cannabis coffeeshops in Amsterdam, post-punk clubs in Berlin, communes, collectives, love affairs that ended on the border of realness, and back again.

Repeatedly, Stew’s story draws a hard, straight line between the redemptive, clarifying, transcendent capabilities of art and spiritual ecstasy or enlightenment. I’ve drawn a few hundred of those lines myself in talks and essays over the years, I admit. But I have resisted tethering myself with them, because when I contemplated joining the Church of Art, my feelings about some of my prospective coreligionists made me think again.

You see, my nature and inclinations are deeply democratic (despite the disappointments of that faith). And so many of the stalwarts of the Church of Art are anything but egalitarian. At the extreme elitist end of the spectrum, worshippers eschew the mundane, living for sublime aestheticized moments involving the exhibition or performance of classic works requiring vast skill and capital to achieve in the form they crave: La bohème or La traviata, Giselle or Coppélia, the Eroica or The Magic Flute.

I heard my favorite story of high-church aestheticism when working as a consultant with a small theater company in Minneapolis. A feature story in the local paper had included the cost of authentic, handwoven tartans the Guthrie Theater had commissioned for a production of MacBeth. That single expenditure exceeded the annual budget of the excellent small theater.

My response to the grotesque excess of this type of red-carpet display—and after all, its utter irrelevance to the actual art being mounted—can be compared to liberation theologists’ repulsion at the Catholic Church’s willingness to invest in material splendor while countless faithful starve or endure severe hardship and oppression.

The gilded frames in which high art is so often presented serve not so much to enable its full expression as to call attention to its place of pride in the pecking-order. I wrote a few years ago about an experiment in which the superstar violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito in a Washington, DC, Metro station, failing to attract either attention or donations from passers-by. I imagine that even the most fervent devotees of the highest Church of Art close their eyes when a particular passage of music touches their hearts most deeply, blotting out the glare of chandeliers on red velvet and white marble so as not to intrude on the essence of the experience.

In London on Wednesday, an anonymous bidder spent over $100 million for Alberto Giacometti’s bronze “Walking Man I.” (Sotheby’s had expected it to sell for less than $30 million, still a remarkable sum.) This has nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the piece itself, but with the glorification of its owner. However much an encounter with the work might touch or engage you or I or anyone else who passed time in its company wherever it were to be installed, that experience has little connection with the thrill of ownership at a headline-grabbing price. The transaction comments not on the power of Giacometti’s work, but on the economic power of its buyer, and on this ravenous beast, the high-art market, that—even as the global economy falters—grows in size and appetite, not even troubling to notice the ocean of suffering that could be alleviated by equivalent investment.

Having joined the Church of Art, I place myself among its liberation theologists, interested in the essence of its teachings, in the expansion of their practice, rather than the glory of its institutions.

To be sure, the DVD of Passing Strange represents significant investment: productions at the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep before Broadway, workshops at Sundance, and more. If the artists had been content with a one-off show in some small club, I never would have seen it at all. But Spike Lee’s production is a concert film, the record of a performance, modest as films go, and very right for its subject. I suppose that is one of the church’s tenets for me, a sense of purpose twinned with a sense of proportion.

Late in the play, Stew, as the narrator, recounts a conversation with a friend at a bar, a friend who sells pretzels for a living:

[H]e said, “The Real.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “The real is not real, my friend. The real is a construct. The real is a creation. The real is artificial. The kid in your play is looking for something in life…that can only be found…in art.”

I keep working that blind spot in our social self-understanding, our inability to see the astounding extent to which our lives are infused, uplifted, and deepened by the experience of art, whether it comes to us via iPod or YouTube, the multiplex, the Met, or the work of our own bodies and spirits. I am hopeful we are going to awaken soon out of the trance that prevents us from seeing, understanding—and therefore pursuing—the public interest in artistic creativity, in beauty and meaning and all they bring. In the meantime, I do my bit to clear out the idols, and I worship.

The epigram that started this post introduces a remarkable moment in the play. Consumed with regret, the main character (”Youth”) creates an imaginary redemptive encounter with his mother, who has died as he lingered in Europe, refusing her entreaties to come home. His older self, the actual Stew as the narrator, sings that he will never see her again. Youth replies:

That’s it? You know, you’re right: you cannot bring her back. But why lose faith in the only thing that can? I will see her again…. Because life is a mistake…that only art can correct. I will see her again…Every night….

Amen.

The drive, a little over an hour through rolling hills and vast flat stretches, was a little surreal, a scene from a personal sci-fi picture in which time folds back on itself, with uncanny echoes. I haven’t made that journey for many years: no reason. But long ago, I lived in Sacramento for a year or so, running a cultural project in the now quaintly kooky days of the Jerry Brown administration.

When I drove away from my rented house in Sacramento for the last time, it was exactly half my life ago. Today is my birthday, so I am able to make this calculation with some precision. Back then, the trip was a drive in the country. At night, when I usually made it, there were long passages with no illumination but the stars and moon. Now most of it is a repeating tableau of discount malls and tract houses, spotlights on billboards tinting the night sky pink.

In between trips to Sacramento, the politics of culture have morphed through several incarnations, including a very long time in which my ideas about culture and democracy (and others like them) have been in official disfavor. But as I am discovering, if you stick around for half your life (so far), you may see the wheel start to turn. Right now, many mainstream arts people—by which I mean leaders of institutions and agencies, mostly—are concluding that the old support strategies are no longer valid, whether on account of their intrinsic flaws or the poor state of the economy, or both. So there’s demoralization, leading to a certain amount of desperation. People keep saying maybe we should abandon the word “art” because it has so many toxic associations, and tremendous energy is being poured into finding a new rubric, as if it were a matter of magic words: creative sector, expressive life, arts ripple effect. But beneath the magical thinking about “branding,” and slogans, there’s an emerging receptivity to new or different ways of understanding the public interest in artistic creativity.

The response to my talk was gratifyingly positive. I pointed out that those who steer our lives along the path of art have almost always been set on that path by an experience of the ineffable enabled and activated by human creativity in the service of beauty and meaning, of “something that can never be adequately expressed, but which ignites in our hearts the desire to keep trying.”

To characterize the state of congruity we seek, I quoted Walter Pater’s inspired assertion that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression.” But along the path of art, there is a wide gap between aspiration and actuality. In the decades marked by the half-life since I lived in Sacramento, our impact has been constrained by dominant social values that make many people tone-deaf to this truth:

Arts advocates have been trying to pour the vast personal and social importance of this experience into containers—into language, slogans, arguments, strategies—far too small to hold it. The result has been almost unbearable frustration at being unable to put our point across. After long exposure to the framework of understanding that insists on privileging material value and things that can be counted, weighed and measured over all other forms of value, we have been reduced to making weak, even desperate arguments that do not do justice to the powerful truths contained in those experiences of the ineffable that set us on our paths in the first place.

As an antidote to this frustration, I shared what I have learned, inviting listeners to experiment for themselves:

Our power to persuade is at its height when there is absolute congruence between what we know and what we say. Many of you are visiting legislators this afternoon. Imagine how it would feel to make even a subtle shift away from repeating the same old and weak arguments, toward representing the much larger and deeper truths that animate your work.

People are hungry for such moments now. It will be a long time before anyone knows what was really happening in this hectic time, when the natural world slammed into the cracks in our human creations, shattering lives as in Haiti, when countless people awakened from the long, fitful slumber of modernity’s superstitions while others kept trying to put their questions to sleep. But I have a growing sense of certainty: the largest movement I discern in this swirling storm is toward a renewal of awareness, such that the things that have been treated as marginal—beauty, meaning, reflection, creativity, facing loss and finding resilience—may be moved toward their true value, toward the center of our collective understanding. I am putting my shoulder behind that movement.

Yesterday, I took a walk with a new friend who told me she had wanted to contact me for several years, since she heard a talk I gave at another meeting, on community arts as spiritual practice. My words had helped her recognize her need to bring her own work into congruence with her deepest truths. She had risked doing what she most desired, and by all measures, she had succeeded.

I thanked her, but I don’t know if I adequately conveyed what an important birthday present she had given me. I understand that the power to spark self-recognition and possibility is not inherent in a particular offering. I’m sure that no matter how much a particular talk resonates with some of the people present, at the back of every room, someone is texting baseball scores, someone is making a grocery list, someone is waiting for it all to be over. Transformative moments emerge from a kind of relationship: my readiness to speak a particular truth, your openness to it (or vice versa). But to know I have been instrumental to some such moments means more to me than I can express.

Half a life ago, when this understanding began to dawn for me, it was primitive and inchoate. All I could really do was imagine some sort of ideal world, and chip away at the orthodoxies that impeded others’ imaginations. Now I have very little interest in the ideal, but I still believe in the power of our capacity for social imagination. They say that blessings can direct energies from hidden realms into this world. If you want to offer one for me on this birthday—and of course, I hope you will—let it be for long, wide-awake life, as filled with the opportunity to catalyze transformative moments as a jumbo box of matches is filled with the potential of fire. (Love and livelihood welcomed too.)

I am trying to notice cues and signposts that come my way, with the result that several times each week, I discover a book, a video, or a podcast by a new teacher. I sincerely doubt I will discover a guru. For one thing, I am not seeking one. It isn’t much in my nature to follow or give over in that way. Periodically, I stop on the path of seeking to try on a particular spiritual discipline with its own boundaries, spiritual technologies and practices. There is always so much to learn; but for me, there is always a place where learning stops, and instead of remaining a seeker, one becomes a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, and so on.

I know that there are many people who find a path of continual opening within those bounded categories. I recognize that some will always describe me: I am a woman, a Jew, even a “Sixties person,” one of those ducklings who was imprinted with love for a unique moment in our collective social inquiry. But in the end, I always feel about seeking as the great James Baldwin felt about art, when he said, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.”

I doubt I could reproduce the chain of events, but last night, my seeking took me to a talk on love by A. Hameed Ali (the creator of a spiritual path called the Diamond Approach, who writes under the pen name A.H. Almaas). The talk is slow going. He seems to rise out of his own fatigue, allowing himself to become animated by his subject. But I really responded to his depiction of spiritual seeking as analogous with love.

And of course, as is almost always true for me, it was through the lens of art that I saw his message most clearly. Almaas quoted Rumi’s Ghazal 1919:

This is love: to fly heavenward
To rend, every instant, a hundred veils.

In the fullness of love, our desire is to give all to the beloved, and to receive all: to know everything, to pierce each veil, seeking the heart of the matter, “to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” When that seeking is blocked, love transmutes to something else, an accommodation, a resignation, a kind of settling, or an end. Almaas’s talk is about loving truth, loving awareness, with the same insatiable curiosity, so that one faces life with that intense desire to know more, and more, and more, whatever comes. I am paraphrasing here, but at one point, he adopts the voice of the seeker to ask something very like this: How can I rest until I know what I am?

My early spiritual education, such as it was, consisted of weekly classes at a Reform Jewish Sunday school. Not many girls were bat mitzvah when I was young; that rite of passage was reserved primary to boys. But the Reform movement had borrowed from other traditions the idea of “confirmation.” At the last stage of Sunday school—if I am remembering correctly, my classmates and I would have been 15 or so when this ended—there was a sort of ceremony of completion.

The confirmation class at my Northern California synagogue was taught by a medical doctor with an interest in other forms of science. I imagine that if he was still around and curious in later decades, he would have reveled in the new spiritual literature grounded in advanced cosmology and physics, because his curriculum was one long, suspenseful monologue tracing the evolution of human life back to the Big Bang. In the theater of memory, I see that it was a set piece: his concept was to lead our young minds through a chain of events culminating (which is to say beginning, since he constructed his lectures as flashbacks) in a mysterious, inexplicable event that ignited the creation of the world.

That was my first experience in being expelled from something for asking too many questions. The sticking-point for me will be obvious to any bright adolescent: if God is merely an explanation for the first cause of creation, how did God come into being? The young mind wants orderly explanations. If we are to stake our understanding of the universe on the chain of causality, there has to be a plausible starting-point. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of a reality outside of time and cause, but I see its necessity. Back in confirmation class, though, my questions sent our poor teacher into a red-faced, sputtering fit, and I was invited to stay away on Sunday mornings, a prospect I greeted with mingled disappointment and relief.

I am certain that as a student, I was annoying beyond belief. But I also see that my teacher did not approach his task as a lover, but as one who had discovered a particularly attractive veil and had decided that it marked the end of inquiry.

What I am seeing today, more years later than I care to mention, is that somewhere along the road, I allowed myself to rest behind a veil too, and the veil is this: the acceptance that certain things are unknowable. Maybe I decided that the chain of causality did represent some ultimate truth, and that trying to find its origins was hopeless, even dangerous; for some people, that veil is called “faith,” a belief that soothes not-knowing. Maybe I was afraid of what might lie beyond the next veil. Maybe I got hurt by what I discovered along the way: there is no guarantee that what you find behind the next veil will be pleasure instead of pain, only that there will be another veil to pierce, and behind the last one, everything.

I am still a lover of questions, and I don’t think anyone else has the power to expel me from this school, at least as long as I draw breath. The choice to continue or to settle will be mine. And now I want to see what it is like to approach my search as if awareness were the beloved, rending “every instant, a hundred veils.”