Yearning

Thawing Cold Wars in the Heart
through Erotic Love and Music


"Yearning is the force field of desire that draws us to God. It grows out of our sense of incompleteness and our deep need for something more which we know can only be met by The More. It is characterized by a restlessness in our souls. We desperately want to move beyond the petty wants of the ego and break out of the self-constructed prisons that confine us...
​Yearning draws out the mystic inside us as we sense the sacred presence in the world and feel one with all that exists. By attending to this desire, we realize that it also fuels our drive for sexual fulfillment. Yearning reveals the sacramental dimensions of erotic love and makes it one of the most enthralling experiences of life."  -- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

​Cold War (Polish: Zimna wojna) 
a film directed by Paweł Pawlikowsk

Trailer

A Scene
"Cold War is a passionate love story between a man and a woman who meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatefully mismatched and yet condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in 1950s Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, it’s the tale of a couple separated by politics, character flaws and unfortunate twists of fate — an impossible love story in impossible times. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and starring Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot."
Yearning as a Spiritual Value
​
"Cold War gives us a lovers’ journey as haunted and haunting as the history of a continent frozen between the utopian vision of what can be and the frustrating reality of what is. It starkly reveals how yearning can sustain a flame between two people, even as time, space, and politics conspire to numb their steamy, creative spirits." -- Micah Bucey for Spirituality and Practice
Music as Constant Comfort
​
"Throughout, music remains the only constant comfort. Zula gains confidence as a charismatic artist in her own right, while Wiktor channels his fevered frustration into sweaty jazz. In the magnetism of their stage performances, their common disgruntlement warms, thawing the frigidity of their increasingly fraught scenes with one another." -- Micah Bucey for Spirituality and Practice
The Art of Discovering Connections

One purpose of poetry and film, of music and dance, is to help thaw cold wars in the heart.  We may not understand the thawing process, but we know that it is happening. We are undergoing what Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat “the art of making connections.”  To this we might simply add that sometimes we don’t make the connections in a conscious way, rather the connections are made for us, and in us, through the circumstances of life and involuntary affections of the heart, as elicited by beauty.  We fall in love.

-- Jay McDaniel
God is in the Connections

You might think that God is something like a king on a throne, or a bully in the sky. Or you might think that God is merely an  illusion in the mind which functions to protect people from the severities of life, like an opiate.  An alternative is take heed of the horizontal sacred.  It is to recognize that there is something holy, something divine, in passionate connections themselves, and in whatever thaws the cold in the heart, so that people can enjoy such connections, however episocially.   Process theologians speak of this thawing process as creative transformation, and one Christian process theologian, John Cobb, identifies such transformation with the living Christ at work in the world, recogniing that  this Christ spirit can be felt and known by other names.  My mother, Virginia McDaniel, simply called it the Holy Spirit . Is there a God beneath, within, behind, or behond these connections?  Is there more to God than the Holy Spirit?  One of the most important process theologians of our time, Patricia Adams Farmer, says Yes and name this beyond Beauty.

-- Jay McDaniel

Process Theology and Defrosting

​
While watching the trailer for Cold War and reading the review of it by Micah Bucey in Spirituality and Practice, I began to wonder if the very idea of cold wars (externally between nations and internally within the heart) might be a good metaphor for understanding process theology.  It would go like this.

  1. Too often suffer from cold wars in the heart: a subjective frozenness in which are hearts are caked with ice.
  2. The ice is takes the form of "frustrated creativity, interpersonal tensions, and cramping confines of the ego."  (Huston Smith in describing Buddhist dukkha.) 
  3. The ice keeps us from enjoying positive connections with others and realizing our own subjective capacities for experiencing the wide range of healthy emotions: attention, amazement, compassion, hope, imagination, play, and zest for life.
  4. We do not willfully create the ice.  It can be foisted upon uw.  The cold wars of the heart can mirror the political circumstances in which we live.
  5. In melting the ice, worldviews -- new ways of framing things intellectually -- can help.  We can lern to see all things as already-connected and to recognize the intrinsic value of all life.  Still, they are not enough:
  6. Passionate love affairs can be occasions for a thawing of internal cold wars.  They open the heart.
  7. Music can also an occasion for a thawing of internal cold wars.  ​​It, too, can open the heart.
  8. There is a religious side to passionate love affairs.   Whatever is good and beautiful and holy is in the positive connections themselves and in the thawing.
  9. God is in the connections and the thawing: God is a cosmic defroster.
  10. God is also the Beauty in the other person, and in the relationship, but also beyond them that inspires the defrosting.
Open Horizons