Memento Mortis

On this blog, I wrote along these lines:

God did *not* "will" it. If you want to say He "allowed" this death, understand that He allowed it in the sense that He "allows" His world to function according to its natural tendencies and natural laws. He does not meddle, generally speaking, with the workings of the world. When He does, it is called a miracle, but it wouldn't be right, or just, or even good, if He were constantly sticking His fingers in to redirect the order of things. And we would cease to have miracles. We would cease to have a trustworthy world if it didn't function according to its own laws.

Death always is senseless and stupid and hard. We were not, in the original scheme of things, made for death. We were made for life, and not just life but a life lived in full, natural communion with our God.We were not made to say goodbye. 
It is sin, and sin only, which causes death and hurt and grief. I learned a long time ago that He does not ask anything of us that He has not already done, and done to an infinite degree more than we. Not that this makes the reality of the thing any easier. I know, too, that sometimes the worst thing of all is knowing that we are strong enough to take it. Strong enough to wake up every morning, to live each day, and survive. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to bear of all.
On the other hand . . . we were made to prepare for death. Our life here should not be one where we flee, constantly terrified, throwing our arms over our eyes or burying our heads in the sand in order to hide from the inevitable. And I cannot help but think that we lost that sense of victory over death so apparent in the Scriptures and early Church Fathers: that a good death is a triumph. That when a holy man or woman dies, we truly do not mourn them, for they have in point of fact run the race, and won. Oh death, where is thy sting? says the Apostle. And he means it. This was a man who lived in the shadow of death daily, for whom to be a believer was to seek a death sentence, and this was his answer. Where is thy sting?
I do grieve, for myself, for the family and friends left behind. But there is peace, peace in the knowledge that a body dead does not mean a soul, a self, dead. By death He tramples death. He has won, and through Him, so have we.
So grieve, but do not rage; weep, but know--know in your head and heart and bowels--that He weeps with you, and, like you, longs for the day when all things will be made new. And trust Him, that in His providence and might, He will, indeed turn the greatest grief to something beautiful.

Why stand ye gazing? Know you not that He has ascended to the Father?

Power and Might

"Now the whole earth had one language and few words" when the line of cursed Canaan began to build the infamous tower, when the Lord thwarted their arrogance by acting to "confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." (Gen 7) It is terrifying, these words, terrifying to think what power lies in language. In pure language, tainted by sin but as yet unbroken, there are "few words." One word holds a vast amount of reality, which is not yet dissected by syllogisms hypotheses logarithms &c. This makes sense, since God, who is perfect, has only One Word by which all things were created, and from which all things take their identity. The multiplicity of creation serves, each bit, to illuminate another aspect of the fullness of Reality, which is God.
Now, thousands of years after Babel, the perversion and reduction of language to babble if not drivel--in accursed "texting", and when language is bent and twisted to serve hideously warped philosophies, two facts are driven home to me:
The centuries-old wisdom of a Latin Liturgy, immune to the perversions and corruptions of time, common usage, colloquialism, ignorance. Yes, Latin is immune to ignorance, for those who do not want to bother with learning, which not all need do!, cannot cheapen the meaning of a Latin word through everyday usage or incomplete comprehension, as happens to the common vocabulary. How right and wise and foreseeing were these ages of the Church, and what a calamity has overtaken the modern Liturgy, which inevitably, inevitably I tell you, sinks to the lowest common denominator!*

Secondly, though, and not completely separately, is the occult dimension which seeks power over the material world by attempting to rediscover words of power--real, actual utterances of the mouth by and through which they can control physical and even human realities. Lewis knew of this aspect of language (and Tolkien, although he focuses on it to a much lesser extent)--they were, after all, first philologists and linguists, the both of them, and only secondarily writers. It runs through his stories, even Narnia:

"The Queen let go of [Digory's] hand and raised her arm. She drew herself up to her full height and stood rigid. Then she said something which they couldn't understand (but it sounded horrid) . . . and those high and heavy doors trembled for a second as if they were made of silk and crumbled away until their was nothing left of them."
and the "Deplorable Word", that  "secret of secrets", by which Jadis (the White Witch) had destroyed her world. (The Magician's Nephew)

It makes the kernel of That Hideous Strength, where Lewis recreates the story of Babel in the modern scientific and academic worlds, where Merlin has returned to help overthrow the new evil and wants to "wake [nature]. I will set a sword in every blade of grass" and Ransom rebukes him:

"I forbid you to speak of it . . . whatever of spirit may still linger in the earth has withdrawn since your time. You shall not speak a word to it. You shall not lift your little finger to call it up. I command you. It is in this age utterly unlawful."

Oh man! I won't draw this out any longer. But ponder, in your own mindframe and your own time, what insights are here in these brief sentences. Power over creation; the idea that body and spirit are drifting further apart with each passing year day hour; things that were possible or permissible ages ago simply may not be so any longer, yet people seek it because perhaps of pride and desire for more power than humans should have (cf Revenge of the Sith and Anakin's fall), or maybe because they desire mystery, that sense of more-than-self that does not exist in the mind that does not know God.




*The "Latin Mass" community is NOT perfect, nor does it have all the answers, and I am frequently ashamed and appalled at the arrogance and judgementalism with which its adherents attempt to propagate and defend their position. It is inexcusable. I speak "merely" of the language itself, not in defense of the unChristian attitude of any individual who might agree.

and the Spirit hovered

I have been returning in my mind to the opening words of the Bible lately, for various reasons. The book of Genesis opens with the beautiful, mystic words

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

Some translations render it hovering, brooding over the dark deep waters. Regardless, I find it a truly imagination-capturing image. It is the first glimpse of the Trinity, of God being not a solitary isolated God, but one who is in some vastly mysterious way in communion: The Father in perfect and eternal union with the Son, which unity breathes forth, or spirates, the Spirit.

And God said . . . First, He says, Let there be light. Reach forth in time, and the opening words of the Gospel of St John (which are read at the close of the Tridentine Mass in supreme fittingness) expound this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God , and all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 

And so: God the Father, who creates through speaking His Word, His one and perfect Word, Who is Jesus, Yeshua, and this act of speaking is spirating, or breathing forth, the Spirit.

I have been thinking of these things so much lately. Speech was broken at Babel into our thousands of babbling imperfect languages, but before then . . .
My tenth-grade physics teacher told us how they were discovering that the smallest particles vibrated constantly, that essentially they are sound. Whether they are or not, in fact, the smallest particles, I don't know, but certainly there is the fact that everything has a vibrating point, that every object will answer, respond to, a certain frequency.
We are separated from the spiritual realms, in this fallen state at least, by our bodies . . . Christ's glorified body was not: even as the Son of God, His body still respected the bounds of physical limitations. After He rose again, however, He was walking through locked doors and such, because His body was glorified. I do believe after the Second Coming and Final Judgment, we in our glorified bodies still will be physical beings, but untainted any longer by the restrictions, the limitations, of sin--also why some of the saints have overcome some of these bonds and have levitated, bilocated, &c.
Likewise, because of sin our words were broken, limited, bonded to and by speech. Like bodies, they can be corrupted, disappear, shift meanings as our bodies change with age . . . but what is perfect speech?

God spoke . . . the Word was with God, and the Word was Go d . . .

Many many many know the power of music. Hans Christian Anderson phrased it, "When words fail, music speak." My mind half-remembers a quotation I ran across in high school along the lines "When all else fails,  when art has nowhere left to go, people turn to music."
What then is this draw to, this pining for, relief in music?
I think it is the closest thing we have to the unbroken, perfect Word. Somehow, when all is said and done in irrevocable finality, when our bodies are glorified and the world made new, our speech will be no longer bounded by these cumbersome letters and phrases, but will be akin to music.

post-modernism and the abstracted self

I got into a Walker Percy kick again recently, for the first time in a while. At one point, I read him voraciously, reveling in the irony, the dissipation, the odd redemptions, at times bitter, at times flat, at times (such as Lancelot which I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone but is an incredible feat), breathtaking.
Feeling irritated with Love in the Ruins, which is the first Percy book I got my hands on and usually delights me, I picked up Lost in the Cosmos, which I love but which, at one point, hit too close to home in its discussion of transcendence and re-entry. At a slight distance, though, I am able to appreciate it greatly, and equally greatly regret that it slipped my mind when writing my master's thesis (so passé and, it may be argued superfluous, but I so badly wanted to write). It's a superb treatment of the post-modern man--or human, if you prefer--dilemma of the abstracted self. Put simply, the modern man has no point of reference by which to define himself, so he is left floating in a constant state of impermanence, unmoored to any solid referent outside of himself . Art and science, claims Percy, are the two ways by which a person transcends the problem of reality, but then s/he is left with the problem of re-entering the word "at Wednesday afternoon at 4 o'clock": How does one who has tasted transcendence deal with the most mundane and humdrum of this often tedious reality?
One thing that slowly dawned on me is that, while spot on with the idea of transcendence and reality and the difficulties of the artist (and, to a lesser extent, the art-lover/receiver), something about the 1983 view of science wasn't quite relevant any more. There is some truth to it, that the "laity" revere science: medicinal, environmental, technological, but there is an edge, a disillusionment, that we have that was still absent to the wondering world of the '70s and '80s. We question surgeries and vaccines; our scientifically-altered food is making us an increasingly ill society; we have seen the limits of and also the fear of advanced weapons technology; we have reached the second decade of the 21st century and still drive cars, by and large, that run on four wheels and gasoline. So I pondered: What has replaced science as our panacea, our new god, our layman-available escape?
Oh friends: it is entertainment. Instead of seeking the cure for the abstracted, "flying dutchman" self, we have sought to numb it continually through means of ever-increasing, ever-more-extreme pleasures.
We are zombies.
Abstracted zombies.
The problem hasn't changed. We, as a societal whole, still are floating around, unmoored, untethered . . . except now we don't care. We numb it: lots of prescription drugs, lots of other drugs, lots of media--oh, such an incredible amount of media! (like this blog: teehee!)--fake online "communities", yogis and gurus and meditation and marriages and non-marriages and "alternative marriages" and God knows what else.
but we don't care, as long as we can numb it, even for a moment.
One slightly spooky coincidence is how well Percy's description of the modern man jives (yes, I did, and no I won't take it back) with C. S. Lewis's depiction of hell in The Great Divorce: isolated individuals, petty squabbling, incessant bickering over nothings, and, above all, the tininess. We are a nation of pusillanimity: of small-souled beings. How much you love your dog or cat or save the whales or the ozone layer doesn't matter a'tall in the end. What matters is our relationship to other human beings. We are the human race. The problem is not saving the abused animals or the abused earth or the whatever. The problem is that we are doing it instead of caring for each other. Because "caring" for each other has come to mean "let me do whatever the hell I want or I will scream intolerance at you."
We will not save ourselves or each other or the dogs (after all, it is very, very wounded people who abuse animals and children) or the earth (ditto that: if I don't care about myself, why should I care two pins about the earth?) or the whatever. And we cannot fix ourselves or help anyone else until we find moorings. And, as Walker Percy, the first in a family of generational suicides not to kill himself (it was at least his father and grandfather, if not great-grandfather, as well, and I believe an uncle or two) well knew, the only way to survive this world, to find moorings, is to find God. After that, well, as Lewis says:
"A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never simply by going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--or else not. It is still 'either-or'. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."  (The Great Divorce, "Preface")

and He became sin

last friday, 14 September, the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. i lost track of the dates and couldn't have told you that, but the boys and i try to make it to Mass on fridays, regardless, so by the grace of God, we made it.
the first reading of this feast is the story of the israelites compaining in the desert, so they are punished with a course of serpents. as they lay dying, they begin to repent, so God tells Moses to raise up a serpent on a pole, and whomever gazes on it will be saved from death.

photo courtesy of artvalue

this is viewed as one of the first images of the Crucifixion, but it always has puzzled me. a serpent is a symbol of satan and sin, not of Christ, so why is this an image of the crucifixion?
the biggest sin that the israelites commit after leaving egypt, the one that kept them in the desert for forty years and brought the serpents to them, was grumbling against God--some translate it as "murmering" against God for not leading them directly to the promised land. this whole thing has so many layers of symbolism that it is hard to stay focused: for us, egypt is our own sin, and the desert is our own life, which gives us the opportunity to become pure, to enact our salvation and live out grace so that we can stand with God, with nothing between Him and us. because any speck of sin is incompatible with God's presence (hence the strongest argument for Mary being pure from sin: if Christ was to live in her, she could not have had original sin. Christ and sin cannot cohabitate). so it makes sense that sin must die, typified by the serpent on the pole, before we enter heaven.
but Christ was sinless.
then i remembered an image that an artist i knew many years ago had been given. i do not remember the whole scene, except that it depicted Christ in profile. in iconography, saints are always shown with their whole face, which is why if one is looking off to the side, the face looks out of proportion: so it can show the whole of it. and which is why, if you look at an icon of the last supper, you can tell which is judas, because he is the only one shown in profile. so this friend remarked that this image was blasphemous, unless taken in the context of that verse that Christ was made sin . . .
the verse is 2 Corinthians 5.21, and the KJ translation reads, "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."

giotto's crucifixion

this, then, is why the image of the serpent can typify Christ: the Christ who died on the Cross took on and became our sin. and this is the only way in which we can be saved, is if we nail our sin to the Cross with Christ. our sinfulness must die, because anywhere that sin holds, is not held by Christ. every sinful habit, every vice to which we cling, is not saved. this, then, is what purification means, and what it means to be crucified with Christ so that the new nature may live, so that we may be God's righteousness.

False Dichotomies

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom or philosophy." - Ludwig von Beethoven
Once in another life I acquired a t-shirt for the main purpose of vexing someone whom I wished to vex. Many, many years later, and much worn, it still reads quite clearly. Beethoven is one of my favourite composers, and I was delighted at its defiant proclamation of sense over reason. When my dad read it, his comment was simple: the quotation creates a false dichotomoy between knowing through reason (philosophy) and knowing through the sensed (art). I admitted, at the time begrudgingly, that he was right, and that at the very least philosophers need to accept that art teaches in many ways that reason cannot, and artists need to accept that their philosophies form their art. Well and good.
"The world of the fairy-story is that world which is opposed throughout to the world of rational truth." -Novalis.
I love George MacDonald, and was very excited to finally acquire and begin reading his Phantastes. In the beginning quotation, however, I stumbled upon this sentence and was troubled by it. Perhaps it is intended to mean that we cannot be bound by the rules of the natural world when entering "Faerie"(Tolkien), that we must leave behind our preconceptions and expectations of normal cause-effect, even. Well and good to this, as well. I would like to think that. But it doesn't say that, quite. It says rational truth. Perhaps it is using a dangerous word, or perhaps the translator mis-chose (although I question that: When those Germans go wrong, they get *really* nutty). This seems to me to be once again setting up a false dichotomy. Art is not its own truth; Faerie is not its own truth, and to leave behind the world of truth when entering the world of art is to enter the world of lies. A work of art can depart from the world of literal truth, but not from the world of moral truth: one could even say it must do the former and must not do the latter.
off the cuff, I would say that this continued and insistent dichotomy is the work of arrogance. Find the humble artist, the humble philosopher, the humble scientest, and you have found truth and goodness and beauty--or at least the way there.

where to go, where to start

   Most people now are looking for "a better place," which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned . . . . I think he gave up the idea taht there is a better place somewhere else. There is no "better place" than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven . . .
   "Something better! Everybody's talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don't matter if it ain't nothing but a log pen."
   -Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

I don't agree with Wendell Berry's views of education, but then, I don't think he understands education as anything except the prevalent view: a means (degree) to an end (more money). He does not, I don't think, understand education as liberal arts, in the ancient sense.  Perhaps he still would not agree, but I think maybe he does. What he does understand, and what I do agree with so strongly, is his view of land, and the realization that this is where it must begin, with love of earth and land, with appreciating the value of simplicity and the simple life: renewing the land, renewing homes, continuing cultivation through generations, being able to transmit the values from father to son: the importance of hard work, of working with one's whole self. Speaking of his daughter's unfaithful husband, Nathan says, "It would have been better for Marcus if he had been tireder at night."
It is absurd, I agree, how divorced everything has become. People sit in offices all day and then go to other insides to "work out," rather than having a life and job incorporating both--and surely this is possible without everyone farming. Surely not everything must be so isolated, including families--from each other and from themselves, even, so often husbands and wives and children having completely separate lives.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell works from the presumption that families are not, or at least no longer are, the primary shapers of their children. In modern society, this is often the case: that, as Gladwell asserts, the silences that would be filled with the voices of adults are now filled with cell phones, video games, television, texting, et cetera, ad nauseum. But, of course, this does not have to be the case, and returning to the sort of simplicity that Berry's stories portray would be a good place to start.