Hidden in the Cold

David would’ve been age 40 today…suppose is, in memory at least… gone just before 19, just over 21 years ago. Reading in the middle of the night from Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross, adds perspective on loss. In her chapter on “Spirit and Faith” (reflecting particularly on the work of St. John of the Cross, both Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul):

Therefore faith is a totally dark night for the soul. But it is precisely by these means that it brings her light: a knowledge of perfect certainty that exceeds all other knowledge and science so that one can arrive in perfect contemplation at a correct conception of faith. That is why it is said: Si non credideritis, non intelligentis (“If you do not believe, you will not understand,” Is 7:9). [fn 3: See Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.3.2-4 ]

From what was last said, it has not only been made clear that faith is a dark night, but also that it is a way: the way to the goal toward which the soul strives, to union with God. For it alone gives knowledge of God. And how is one to arrive at union with God without knowing him? However, in order to be led by faith to the goal, the soul must conduct itself in the right manner.  She must enter into the night of faith by her own choice and by her own power. After having renounced all desire for creatures in the night of the senses, in order to reach God, she must now die to her natural faculties, her senses, and to her intellect also. For in order to reach the supernatural transformation, she must leave behind everything natural. Yes, she must divest herself, as well, of all supernatural goods when God grants her any of these. She must let go of everything that falls into the realm of her power of comprehension. ‘And she must remain in the dark like a blind man, leaning upon dark faith and choosing it as light and guide and not supporting herself by anything she understands or enjoys or feels or imagines. For all this is darkness that will lead her into error or delay. Faith, on the other hand, is above all such understanding, enjoyment, feeling, or imagining.’ [fn 4: Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.4.2-4] 

   from pp. 58-59 Stein, The Science of the Cross

 Looking back at written reflections, this item seems good for reflection:

When You Come to the Land

Halfway to his third-grade class, I lurch at the wheel
spotting bare ankles between jeans and sneakers,
and feeling the cold rubber brake as on our soles.
It’s mid-December. Ice crusts the left-over rain.
How can he not know his socks are missing?
We can’t blame sleepiness as he’s jabbering away
about meteor showers, fishing for a word
to catch the ground between exciting and afraid.
Some line’s down between head and foot.
Did a big storm pass through, snow and wind?
Has the ground around him been too harsh?
The stares cold inside the house, an icy silence?
Oh, perhaps he’s in search of winter’s power,
that makes hidden, in the cold, the hope of spring.

 

Entering Mystery

Why? For example, why am I writing? Why read? Reading for escape and pleasure, sure—why but theology! I’m just completing a collection of essays that … and as I draft this line, my screensaver answers:

Excuse the interruption (although it is the answer in cryptic form, appropriately).

     To resume, I just finished reading Thinking Through the Death of God, edited by Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder. The excellent volume is subtitled A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer, and it consists of essays by 12 leading theologians, followed by a response from Altizer. My engagement with Altizer has been noted in the three previous blogs; and his provocative soul-searching continues to nourish the journey and to tease the way providing critical bits of understanding along with lots of intriguing not-yet-getting-it. Most, if not all, of the contributors acknowledge that reading Altizer can be difficult, and yet each proves the ultimate value of the effort. Altizer himself, three pages from the end, confirms

“… this is not a challenge to an elite few; it is rather a challenge to us all, and just as each of us has been hurled into a condition of ultimate emptiness, each of us must find a way through that emptiness…” (p. 227)

A helpful comment on this challenge comes in David Jasper’s chapter, “In the Wasteland: Apocalypse, Theology, and the Poets.”

The Self-Embodiment of God has been described by Altizer as a gratuitous gift, the result of a long and deep struggle, and it is perhaps for this reason that its reader—though this is also true of most of his writing—must transcend the author himself, enacting a genuine communion that is nothing short of a liturgical experience. This may well explain why a critical reading of Altizer’s work is so difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible: certainly it evokes a religious reading that, at best, is participatory or even celebratory, rather like his own readings of poets such as Blake or Dante. To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…

Altizer’s writing…as a poetics that yearns in its very language for a ‘total presence,’ which is, in fact, nothing other than true prayer—a voice of silence experienced as such an intensity that it is everything and nothing. Such total presence in Altizer’s theology is a suspension that explains his profound acknowledgement of Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the place (which is no place) where opposites meet and the possibility is held out for redemption and purification. (p. 185, 187)

     As Jasper articulates, I read (and write) as a means to reach toward the sacred, that is, to pray. Let’s return to his lines: “To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…” We might substitute “to write is to listen” in place of the first phrase: To write is to listen, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation. When I write, usually as a meditation with material from reading, and when this infuses with the gift of images, the photos provided by “total presence” (as much as I am capable) of beauty in nature, when these “gratuitous gifts” flow in, around and through—well, it’s prayer. And in the silence, grace brings peace, reconciliation of opposites, insight into mysteries, manna for the journey.

A recent, if not ever-present, question/concern for a “solitary dreamer” (a phrase used in Alphonso Lingis’ chapter on “Kenosis” that I accept as apt for me) relates to whether the [solitary] journey must engage community and, if so (as often asserted by writers I admire), how and how much? This band of searchers that crowd my study and demand my time, these theologians, poets, story tellers, and a few walking/talking/loving close friends—Isn’t that the church of today? Consider Lingis on the visionary:

The visionary language makes us see what the visionary has seen. But for us to see what the visionary has seen is for a visionary to awaken in us. It is indeed a visionary in us that alone makes contact with the visions in visionary literature and receives from the visions the writers have received. Thomas Altizer affirms that it is through knowing a primal vision of one’s own time and world that one can open one’s own vision to the infinitely deeper vision of our great visionaries. (p. 205)

     The final word belongs to Altizer. In his concluding page, he returns to a frequent and central theme: the crucified/resurrected body of Christ. As I’m reading this conclusion, my mind echoes, “the body of Christ” as “the church,” the gathering of two or more who compose the profane/sacred mystery incarnate.

If we do not yet know a resurrected body, or do not do so either fully or decisively, we can know a crucified body, and can know the full actuality of that body, and most clearly know it in the ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, a suffering that can be known as a renewal of the Crucifixion. But if it is a renewal of the Crucifixion it is a renewal of the passion of God, a passion inseparable from an apocalyptic transfiguration, a transfiguration only possible through the death of God, or only possible through an absolute self-emptying or self-sacrifice of the Godhead, a sacrifice that is the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, and a crucifixion that is itself the consequence of an absolute genesis or an absolute beginning. But if the Crucifixion is the most ultimate realization of the body itself, it is so only as an absolute breaking of the body, a breaking that is renewed in the Eucharist, and comprehensively embodied in the most ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, then body as body is absolutely real, and finally real only as the body of Christ. This is certainly not the ‘spiritual body’ of Christ, not a mystical body that is an other-worldly body, it is the very reversal of every possible other-worldly body, indeed, a reversal ending every other-worldly body, a reversal that is the totality of incarnation, and only thereby the totality of resurrection itself.

     And as I complete Thinking Through the Death of God, re-reading Altizer’s final lines, this image appears on the screen: 

Fire

Civilization and its institutions of culture guide fire, at their best, channeling wisely our human passions, maturely directing these forces into constructive production, or at a minimum into non-destructive venting. We dare not attempt to extinguish passion. Without fire, the inner and outer worlds die due to lack of heat and light. Religion, education, and the arts should serve the function of tending fire. When these institutions fail to provide sufficient guidance, humanity and our environment burn up or freeze.

Last night, we viewed a 2017 PBS program on Yosemite.  Even three years ago, climate change was shown to threaten this incredible ecosystem. The warning emphasized rising temperature, drought, and the risk of excessive wildfire, but the program also noted the necessity of fire in the life cycle of the giant sequoias (e.g., to release the seeds from the cone and to open space for seedlings to get sunlight). Of course, without water the entire natural wonderland is doomed. Overheating of the environment threatens the imminence of this catastrophe. Fire, water, earth, and air are all needed in proper balancing.

  A similar threat to the natural world can be seen in the human ecosystem with the reduction of impulse control. Persons in positions of leadership in politics and in the media fail to exercise sufficient reflection on words prior to making them public. Irresponsible mediation results in fake news, distortion (intended or not), and divisions that prompt violence and harm especially toward vulnerable sub-populations. Of course, as voters and consumers we fuel the wildfire when we are not turning our passion into the force of love, when we allow hostile emotions to reside within our hearts, even in those impulses to feel the other as a fool.

A civilized society channels fire into constructive work as well as re-creational activity. For example, competitive sports contribute a vital venue for guiding youth into responsible self-management of power, learning to direct combustive energy that is capable of driving achievement; but violence from players and addictive engagement from the culture prove the failure from coaching and from the wider arena of fans, parents, and sponsors. Each person needs an outlet for passionate engagement that creates and nurtures.

The coronavirus pandemic relates to the overheating. The consequent stoppage of “March Madness” (in the broad sense extending way beyond basketball) offers an opportunity for reflection and reform. Time and space have now been set to ask important questions: 

• What is most essential? 
• How do we live into the depths of love? 
• How can we individually and collectively dedicate ourselves to attending the highest values, including our capacity for tending the human spirit tuned to the divine inheritance?

Thru the Snow Fog

In a dream last night, the figure that was most clearly me was directing others preparing the activity we were about to conduct, and in the midst of the detail came the essence. The purpose of the whole crystallized along with the awareness that this raison d’etre was probably not prominent in consciousness and should be articulated. This morning wakens with woods steaming in a snowfog, the spring-seeking twigs budding in rainbow drops, each whispering the secret of the hidden universe, for the clean heart to witness.

My dreams and thoughts doubtless reflect readings. Yesterday I finished Omid Safi’s Memories of Muhammad and Matt Rees’ Mozart’s Last Aria. I was also copying passages from recently completed Schuon’s Eye of the Heart and had looked up references to Chittick’s Self-Disclosure of God. One gem: “Each person has a unique knowledge from God that is given to no one else” (Chittick, p. 138).

     And yet, who sees through the fog of to-do distractions enough to remember the essential truth, the message inscribed deep in the individual heart? Who troubles to clean away the false attractions, who allows the pain necessary to polish the mirror, and lets in the light that makes the rainbow trail into the secret? Perhaps it’s not as hard as we fear. 

     The world has too many preachers of hellfire and peddlers of fake gold. Fear and anger block the way. Fundamentalist rule-keeping makes a short cut to nowhere holy. Instead, the clean heart bows toward love. The only way. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8).

     The fog is lifting outside a bit now. The path into the woods opens further. 

I’m learning to listen to the voices that carry a special tone and looking for the lens that hones into beauty. As Rumi says, “like this… like this…”

Sense of the Sacred

                 

The world seen through the windows of my study, even in the muted tones of autumn, abounds in natural beauty. And still, it's a world away from the rainforests and breath-stopping coastlines of Australia where we felt spirited away to a magical place.   

But there, too, like the D.C. suburbs where we resided for many years, the streets outside our airport hotel in Sydney, convenient for the return flight, were of a different world, much more grey and noisy. In order to enter the beauty of nature and especially to commune there with the divine, we may need to realize the different realities or "worlds" around and within. 

            In Religion and the Order of Nature, Nasr contrasts a) the world that can be seen, loved, and nurtured as sacred with z) one targeted for pollution and destruction by humans driven by voracious intentions bent on feeding insatiable appetites. In addition to feeding sensory lust for material possession, the rapacious aggression can result also from a thirst for knowledge stripped of the sense of the sacred. “The environmental crisis requires not simply rhetoric or cosmetic solutions but a death and rebirth of modern man and his worldview.” Humans must be reborn to conceive of “a sacred realm reflecting the divine creative energies” (pp. 6-7).

         It’s almost as if inhabitants of this globe are on different planets using the same words but ruled by hugely different worlds. Certain words reference a person’s dominant values such as “nature,” “money,” “sense,” and perhaps most importantly, “God.” And to boggle the mind, the same word can mean vastly different worlds. Each person serves a master of meaning whether it is his/her own self, a quest for knowledge, the Divine Source, or some other force. 

         A complication arises when the culture surrounding words and worlds pervades the individual so that meaningfulness can scarcely be found--unless consciousness develops and shifts . Nasr elaborates how the meaning of Nature has dramatically transformed so that the presence of God often goes missing due to the “scientific revolution” and the “death of God.” It can happen unless a person is “reborn” (as noted above). Without the reborn consciousness, persons in the “modern” world tend to treat nature (including plants, animals, and “othered” humans) as objects suitable for exploitation. The following passages detail the contrasting worlds and significant consequences.

“… among all the factors distinguishing one type of humanity from all others was the presence of the skeptical vein. It led to many scientific discoveries but also to the loss of sacred knowledge and in some cases the sense of the sacred itself. And it remains to this day a salient feature of that type of human being for whom the desecration of nature is meaningless because there is nothing sacred to start with. . . this type of naturalism involved more the rediscovery of pleasure than of the spiritual significance of the body or nature. . . There thus appeared this other important characteristic of modern man so prevalent to this day, that of being a prisoner of his senses, which he must seek constantly to satiate without limit, and that of a follower of a naturalism that is against the order of nature as a value in itself, a being devoted to the bodily gratification without the least interest in the significance of the body in the religious, metaphysical, and cosmological sense.” (p. 172)

The “rediscovery of pleasure” and the “bodily gratification” especially expresses itself in the “appreciation of the importance of money.”

“The modern world needs nothing more than the so-called world-denying mysticism that is nothing other than its ascetic aspect that seeks to control the passions and to slay the dragon within, without which the greed that drives the current destruction of nature cannot be controlled. Moreover, world-denial is simply one aspect of a single reality whose other dimension is ‘world-confirmation,’ but the soul cannot confirm the world as sacred without first of all denying the ‘world’ that disperses the soul from within and makes it ever more reliant upon the material environment for the satiation of an ever-increasing thirst. One wonders how, in the light of the crucial nature of the problem at hand, a deeper distinction is not made by often well-intentioned eco-theologians between the world as enticement toward passion, greed, and aggression and the world as God’s Creation and ultimately theophany.” pp. 217-18. 

Beauty of Great Questions

Sunday here flows in subtle tones, like love on the edge off remembering.

“…troubled by the ultimate questions. No-one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart.” John O’Donohue concludes the meditations with the “beauty of the great questions”: 

[it’s] “how they dwell differently in each mind. How they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image, how they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought. . . The presence of the contemplative and the artist in a culture is ultimately an invitation to awaken and engage one’s neglected gifts, to enter more fully into the dream of the eternal that has brought us here to earth.” p. 247

         The passage referencing the Big Questions takes me back to the final years of teaching, especially in the I-Series program and the capstone course of my career, “Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice.” If I had absorbed and articulated more of the understanding of Beauty that O’Donohue lays out, the title might have included “for Beauty” or perhaps “Stories on Beauty.” We did explore the frontiers of beauty as well as goodness and truth. The terrain of narrative offers spaces to mine into personal identity and the connection with the divine.

   When the youngest sister leaves home and enters the darkest center of the forest, she meets with the threshold question each of is invited to open, to circle around, to listen into: "Who are you?" And, of course, the companion questions: "Where do you come from and where are you going?" "What are you doing here?" Her answer allows us to reflect on our divine heritage: “I am the child of the ruler and I’m searching for my brothers as long as the sun may rise…”

          William Stafford asked it this way: “Who are you really, wanderer?” And the response as I remember it, allowing myself to reconstruct, as each of us might do, instead of looking up “the artificial clay”: “And the answer you have to give/ no matter how dark and lonely,/ I am the child of the king.”