Accessing the Core of Spirituality: Religion in Equus
John Kuczmarski
November 8, 2004
Professor Soderholm
Accessing the Core of Spirituality: Religion in Equus
What is a church? What makes up a religiously spiritual sanctuary? Is it darkened corridors echoing with hymnal reverberations , ornately colored stained glass, and the smoothened, mahogany wood found in most chapels? Or is it some relationship that you intrinsically cultivate and carry around with you, regardless of your environmental surroundings? The Greek word for “church”, “kyriakos”, means “belonging to the lord”, “the body”, “extraordinary being”, and “to make a house”, while “ekklêsia” (another synonym for “church” used in the Gospels) means “assembly” or “congregation”(Liddel 385). Even further from the conventional connection of “church”, occurring before any of the books of the New Testament, is the Aramaic definition, which has a variety of etymological roots connoting festival and celebration (Liddel 385). Maybe a church-like experience should not be a confined, solemn habitat, but an atmosphere that simply provokes and promotes authentic spirituality and connected nurturing of one’s passion. According to Greek ideology, we must experience pain and suffering in order to become passionate spiritual beings. This painful suffering becomes a carving process, whittling away the excess residual sculpture, allowing one to arrive at the altruistic soul. This transparency is created not by a church, but by one’s relationship to his spirituality – his essential religious core. Almost 2000 years after St. Paul’s blinding and consequential conversation to Christian faith, Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, Equus, exemplifies how the protagonist, Alan, initiates a blindingly pious worship involving horses. In Equus, the core of worship and sexuality is accessed on myriad different levels of interpretation, spiritual environment, and church.
The blinding and conversion of St. Paul (then known as Saul) occurred a couple decades after his birth in 10 ad. and caused Jesus of Nazareth to reveal his perception of Paul via Ananias “a vessel of election, to carry [God’s] name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel” (Acts 22:14). Could it be that the young teenager, Alan, felt compelled to become a “vessel of election” and, with missionary-like conviction, spread the word of his equestrian religion; or, possibly, did Alan deify himself to play the role of God by blinding six horses? Alan may not have deified himself, but he certainly was perceiving messages that were, like those Paul recieved, not being experienced by others: “the others could who were with [Paul] saw the light but did not hear the voice of” God (Acts 22: 9). In the story of Paul’s Conversion, Ananias plays the role of a Platonic Guardian because he went back into the cave, to provide Paul with his sight, encouraging him to spread the word of God and practicing moving the soul “from the world of becoming into that of being” by becoming “a vessel of election, to carry [the name of Jesus] before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel" (Plato 143)(Acts 22:14). Plato and the writer of Acts had congruent beliefs regarding the process of enlightenment involving an initial blinding glare of insight. Both of these authors would, no doubt, find meaning in the Zen parable encouraging one to “empty your cup”, insinuating that we only learn new knowledge by being a vessel to communicate a message.
In Equus, Alan becomes a similar kind of Guardian, like Ananias to Paul, liberating the psychiatrist, Dysart, from the “black cave of the Psyche” ( Shaffer p. 75). In Plato’s Allegory, the “church” or location of veritas (teachings of being, instead of becoming) was the new mysterious Sun of Reason and Goodness outside the dark psychic cave, and Alan became a master of this mysterious unknwon, with his “real worship” (p.82) -- the only form of worship he has ever known. Plato tells that stepping into the world of being revolves around the application of the soul: “the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being”. Because Alan applies his soul, unlike Dysart who only applies his mind, to knowledge (exemplified by his hour of equestrian freedom and worship) he steps into the liberating world of being. This profound worship allows Alan to grow: “without worship, you shrink”, and create a haven for his practices – the corral (Shaffer p. 82).
Alan’s conception of church clearly revolves around the stable and the horse corral. This environment provides spiritual cultivation and access to the deified Equus and other horses for sexual and spiritual worship. Yet, Alan interprets the corral as a permanently safe sanctuary solely for horse worship. By limiting the spiritual context of the stable solely for horse worship, Alan immerses himself in maladaptive isolation and fixates himself in a dangerously intractable position. An ancient Taoist monk said, “Changing with change, is the changeless state”. The wisdom entrenched in this simple adage rings remarkably true with Shaffer’s message regarding the dangers of immutability. By orchestrating a symphony of horse galloping, medieval-like worship, and “fantastic surrender to the primitive”, Shaffer depicts Alan’s interpretation of the corral as “church” to be exclusively used for spiritual connections with horses (p.82). Even though his “real worship” illuminates Dysart, like Ananias did with Paul, Alan’s rigid interpretation of the stable becomes his confining cave. With his excessibely myopic perception, he fails to change with the change, and this produces blatantly brutal and bloody ramifications, neglects to make the religious sanctuary a church that could house sexual spirituality with humans, and denies himself the capacity to grow and connect with Jill.
Our ability to comprehend that the relationship to the environment, and not the environment itself, cultivates spirituality in a place is remarkably important and poignant. Once we realize that “Passion, you see, can only be destroyed by a doctor. It never can be created”, we begin to cease external seeking a remedy for a lack of truth and fulfillment, and examine ourselves for spiritual prescriptions, engendering our internal capacity to nurture the generation of our intrinsic truths (p. 108). Once these truths have been accessed, we embrace the core of our spirituality, and by seizing and holding onto that core, we can, regardless of the atmosphere, remain engulfed in a connection spiritually-insightful poignancy and. Like any entity that can be used to catalyze serenity or deified to provoke celestial callings, the distinctive line separating horses and spiritual connections becomes remarkably porous if you’re committed to the experience. I have a friend who, after riding for over 14 years, has developed a connection with the horse where she simply thinks about turning, and through a meditative-like connection, the horse instantly responds as if the human and the horse were one. This exemplifies a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhism: wie wu wie, or “doing not doing” (Lao-tzu vii). By being immersed in the experience of the present, the rider, thought and action, dream and reality, are smudged together in a cohesive bond of instantaneous connection. . If Baudrillard discusses the formation of an image, where the simulacra’s perversion and concealment of reality’s absence creates a “pure simulacra”, the meditative experience that unites horse and rider, like Alan’s relationship to Equus, represents the reverse process – the dissimulation of such an image, where the reality, and not the simulacra, becomes pristinely real (Baudrillard). This pure connection with religion is what Alan then tries to dissimulate, “to feign not to have what one has”, at the onset of his psychological dialogues with Dysart (Baudrillard). When Dysart sees through Alan’s ploy of Socratic irony, he becomes enticed by Alan’s intimate connection to the “dessert of the real” (Baudrillard) and uses some of his own “bloody tricks” to not only get Alan to confess, but to try to access his own authentic church (Shaffer 79).
It is clear that this pristine connection with the environment exemplifies the church that many characters in Equus try to emulate. The church for the psychiatrist, Dysart, in the play was clearly the psychological office and his ritualistic hobby of perusing Grecian art books. This was his ritual and provided him with a personally cultivated agenda for meaning, and, relative to Alan, this ritual manufactured an exponentially smaller amount of religious poignancy, but simulated fulfillment in Dysart’s dryly insipid sexual life, absent marriage, and confining home. Finally, the church for many of the men viewing the pornographic film, including Alan’s father, Frank Strang, was illuminated as the theater itself. When experiencing the milieu of the room, the bewildered and awe-struck Alan said, “all the men were staring up like they were in church” (p. 92). The lustful men had the metamorphic capacity to transform a sleezy porno theater, into the reverence one would exhibit in a cathedral. The role of the authentic church is one that holds on to a center, but has incredible spiritual potential, as well.
In the ancient Tao Te Ching, or “Book of the Way, by Lao-Tzu, a free-flowing entity called the Tao is discussed in detail: “The Tao is like a bellows:/ it is empty yet infinitely capable./ The more you use it, the more it produces;/ the more you talk of it the less you understand./ Hold on to the center” (Lao-tzu 5). Even though these Chinese words of wisdom were written nearly 500 years before Paul’s christening, the parallels between God’s message to hold on to the Christian center and to seek out its infinite capability are remarkably similar. The mathematician, Koch, produced a formula that deals with infinitum. His curve mathematically proves a infinite perimeter, but finite area of a curve. This simultaneously restricted and boundless – finite and infinite – curve illustrates the mathematical equivalent of the Tao. The Christian message of Paul’s conversion, the above Chinese words of wisdom, and Koch’s curve suggest a truly boundless faith – unconditionally infinite – in order connect with an authentic church. According to Thomas Paine who said, “my mind is my church”, we realize that this message encourages us to live connected to the spiritual core of our own vitality, not to become paralyzed by over-analysis, and most importantly, to hold fast to our own spiritual center of poignancy – the mind. Unlike the Cyclops, who lacks awareness and only “dwells in his own mountain cave…indifferent to what the others do”, we must avoid blindness in our mind’s eye by cultivating awareness and by holding on to our center, or we risk being distracted by tempting veils of unfulfilling endeavors (Homer 306: 119). The Christian church would refer to these as sins of temptation, but anything that doesn’t resonate with your authentic self keeps you in the cave, sacrificing mobility of your core.
Stepping out of the cave does not, certainly, insinuate abandoning the church, but it does imply the necessity of expanding our perception of religion and a house of religion. When I was in Costa Rica participating in a Christian Surfer mission, the religious priests, confident that “they carry the church with them”, had daily sermons on the beach. Despite their glamour, do we really need the stained glass, pews, and altar to create a building, housing religion? At the end of Equus Alan’s fervent piety provoked Dysart to realize his perversion with psychiatry and embrace the conversion of authentic being. Outside of one’s allegorical cave, authentic faith has the capacity for unconditional and omnipresent worship -- unaffected by the environment -- in any nostos (Greek, for home) be it a horse stable, movie theater, or Cycloptic cave.
But everything is reflective of the beholder. Embracing a religion that upholds morality and virtue doesn’t make your good. Everything is interpretative and dependent on how your utilize beliefs. Terrorists, for example, use the September 11 bombings as placation for religious qualms. They erroneously substantiated Islamic faith as proof to support the terrible destruction and death they incurred. Being ideologically allied with one of the world’s major religions, this erroneous alignment became dangerously charged. In his Republic, Plato reminds us of enlightenment’s double-edged design: “Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue --how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness”. Despite their inherent nature, enlightened beliefs can be used for malign, perpetuating evil or for devout veneration, promoting the endurance of benevolence and compassion. We must make the choice to enliven our generous capacity for love.
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