Revelation

Sunrise today

    Have you ever felt the infidelity of “I know exactly how you feel”? The attempted comfort uttered by yourself to a dear friend or by someone to you, almost always spoken with good intention, nevertheless betrays the unique essence of profound, inarticulable experience. The holy inhabits silence. “No two sufferings are the same” emphasizes Stanley Hauerwas, in Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering (p. 3). Truth approximates instead in “the concrete particular”, 

and “knowledge, in the case of God, requires a lifelong transformation of the self” (p.10 & p.113 in Hauerwas' Theologian’s Memoir, Hannah’s Child).

Often the dawn revelation attempts to unveil the truth: Never the same place. The second hand ticks: a new creation alongside dying. Even side by side in the same instant, no two people share complete identity. Any photo taken, any image of reality cannot replicate another. In the silence, inarticulate, a person may approach the Divine. 

And yet, endowed with speech, especially in story, the transforming self may be shared. And through image/imagination.

Sunrise one week ago

Morning Message

 

Sunrise today reflects the night reading in Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed [Translated by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman].

"All the spheres are living bodies with souls and minds that conceive God and know the sources of their being, the incorporeal minds that emanate from God and mediate between Him and every body in the world.” 

...“the spheres are alive, rational, and conscious… The Philosophers call them living beings that obey their Lord, praise and glorify Him—and what praise and glory it is! As it says, The heavens recount the glory of God [, the firmament tells of His handiwork] (Psalms 19:2). How far from the truth are those who read this as poetic personification!”  p. 194 II.4 and II.5

Respect for the Holy

“There has been no greater loss to modern Western civilization than the loss of access to the sense of the numinous, the holy, which necessarily results from the loss of access to the inner worlds and [also results from] the exclusive concentration on the external, natural world” (Kathleen Raine, The Inner Journey of the Poet, p. 142).

     After finding its way onto one of my bookshelves almost five years ago, this treasure from Kathleen Raine somehow about a week ago found its way into my hands. Perhaps the time lapse was because readiness to take it in took awhile to develop. During the reading, the text has been resonating, radiating through to the heart, and generating almost as much heat as the hundred-degree temperatures outside. 

     Raine’s work features the reclaiming of the tossed-out holy land. Her expertise on Yeats and Blake provides the scaffolding for building an increased consciousness that might be strong enough to struggle through today’s dominant culture which neglects the holy resulting in the Waste Land. Raine references the harsh portrayal in T.S. Eliot's poem and contrasts its dystopian view with works and vision of selected poets and artists. 

     She elaborates the foundation offered in the art of Blake and Yeats especially through interweaving with works by David Jones’ (Anathemata and Parenthesis), the art of Cecil Collins, and poetry, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Edwin Muir. This structure affirms the unique selfhood of each person, individually bearing the mark of the divine, and still integrating with nature and with tradition. 

“There is a curious convergence between Hopkins and Blake, both of whom opposed to the materialist view of nature the more ancient—and also more modern—view of each creature as an unique and distinct impulse of life; ‘their habitations/And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joys’—as Blake says” (p. 109).

The divine mark, the implanted image finds vital nurturance through the imagination. Considering the work of Cecil Collins, Raine asserts that the world of Imagination is 

“not imaginary—on the contrary, since the world of Imagination is the supremely, specifically human universe, the ‘kingdom’ proper and peculiar to humankind, which we alone inhabit, it is the most real of all worlds. The human world is above all an invisible world of thoughts, feelings and imaginings, experienced not by the body but by the soul. That world does not belong to nature, nor can it be known or measured in natural terms, being of another order, differing from the natural order not in degree but in kind. The inner kingdom has laws of its own, forms of its own, communicated only through the reflected images of painting, music and poetry. . . It is of the very nature of human art to make perceptible the invisible world of the Imagination…the expression of that inner order, of the structures, the energies, the living presences within the psyche” (Kathleen Raine, The Inner Journey of the Poet, p. 137).

     While the gift from the Source resides in each individual, access to it is not automatic. The structure needed for nurturing imagination includes developing intimate relationships among nature, knowledge, and love. The dominant culture of today (certainly in my experience) highlights the scientific, the rational, and the material. My academic program and professional survival depended (at least to the .01 level of significance) on learning quantitative statistics and empirical research. How in the world can we expect any less dedication and rigor if we wish for capacity in spiritual regions, in soul space, in heart land?

     My plans are to explore possible ways for such development in coming days.

Fourth of July

July 4, 2024  5:10AM

Predawn readings concluded with these reflections;

The Flying Change ends with “steep return”

After having mused on the aim for perfect freedom.

In concert, Palmer's Oriental Mysticism

Guides our self-search homeward-bound.

That lifting off as human/horse power join

Sweetly, as if held in God's hand, soft–

Dare we imagine life, not mean, beloved

   From E.H. Palmer: “The Universe is the mirror of God, and the heart of man is the mirror of the Universe; if the Traveller then would know God, he must look into his own heart; if he would know the light, he must look into his own heart” (p. 41, Oriental Mysticism).

   In the title poem from his Pulitzer Prize, The Flying Change, Henry Taylor reminds the traveller: “Turning at liberty, [the horse] can change leads without effort during the moment of suspension, but a rider’s weight makes this more difficult. The aim of teaching a horse to move beneath you is to remind him how he moved when he was free” (p. 50).

   Midnight meditations the night before considered that love in essence focuses the quality that enables the (re)union with the One. It’s that which prepares, matures, and cleans so that the person better discerns the Presence and more fully engages the beloved.The “beyond” can only be approached, neared, by hint, by scent or taste, because it belongs to the Unknown, to the inarticulable, as the Infinite, as any and each of the Ninety-Nine Names. None can be owned. Vigilance must diligently prevent the making of idols out of the unique and ephemeral. Drive on. No hoarding of spent treasures. The beating heart won't abide in rag and bone shops.

On Chill Rain, Cutting, and Moving Inside

We celebrate, of course, the spring rains, especially when softly falling, slight breeze. We share into a deepened sort of joy, the kind taken down to sense life force even alike the newly opened daffodils bowing, bent into the crossed, lifeless stalks. Also, while reluctant to cut, some cheer comes through the movement inside. 

We might note some parallel here with Samuel Terrien’s Job: Poet of Existence. His introduction cleanly asserts the direction of the book. 

“The poet of Job did not attempt to solve the problem of evil nor did he propose a vindication of God’s justice. . . he not only takes his place among all those who suffer, fighting with the incomprehensible forces of evil in the noce oscura, but he also can speak to all sufferers an authentic word of comfort, begetting in them the virtue of serenity over woe. . .

And we who read Job may likewise find a gain in the loss of self-sufficiency. ‘As pain that cannot forget,’ wrote Aeschylus, ‘falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’” (p. 21-2). 

Terrien proceeds to take us through the entire text of Job, just enough commentary along with amplifications from scripture as well as contemporary literature, so that the Deus Absconditus, the ineffable, the mystery surpassing human grasp, eases somewhat through the mist, unsurprisingly by the grace of love. Thus, the touch of comfort, the enlightening of peace. The gift of this text can be sampled in a passage taken near the conclusion as Job, after so much talk and rebuttal, finally goes almost mute in response to the Voice proceeding from the whirlwind.

In the presence of the holy, Job could not speak. ‘To make the relation to God into a feeling is to relativize and psychologize it. True relation is a coincidentia oppositorum, an absolute which gathers up the poles of feeling into itself’ [Terrien, p. 242; quoting Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue].

 

Presence in “Time-Out-Of-Time”

Wondering, ah, well, to be more honest, I’m grumbling about recent fiction and the too-prevalent topsy-turvy trend. Authors seem to feel it necessary to skip around among narrators. Equally, if not more troubling, is the jump-around time. Too often I have to waste time scrutinizing the top of each new chapter checking for time indicators. Authors show no compunction about jumping forward or back twenty or a hundred years. In short, a reader can no longer trust today’s composer to keep time, place, or point of view! Writers flagrantly violate the norm of beginning-middle-end. Why won’t they start at the beginning and continue steadily to the end? Like life.   

Today

Or maybe that’s not life. And the fiction was/is that it ever has been.

Consider the experience of almost any hour: often it includes wanderings of mind/heart/soul, maybe even the body. Perhaps the development of consciousness progressively and selectively includes increased awareness and capacity for getting out of “now” (and without losing the invaluable ability to choose to “be here now”).  Maybe there’s significant value in those impertinent remembrances and wily imaginations that just take off into reconstructed pasts. Even the ones that don’t go back cleanly but instead overlap into fanciful possibilities play important roles. The authentic path-maker, even pursuing the traditional ways, continually prays for revelation on “Whose woods these are?”

Maybe old boundaries need to be muddied by this quagmire wonderland of “What If…” Eric Auerbach articulates this phenomenon with the term “figura.” 

“… the notion of the new manifestation, the changing aspect, of the permanent runs through the whole history of the word [figura]” (p. 12, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature).

Being present to “now” has the paradoxical capacity to participate both from the prophetic past as well as to reverberate even into future, all this in deepening meaning to the self: inheritance and destiny.

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves of fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act. In practice we almost always find an interpretation of the Old Testament, whose episodes are interpreted as figures or phenomenal prophecies of the events of the New Testament. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 73

“Reality” thus composes of a hodge-podge blurring past/present/future, perhaps making life more bizarre than fiction. And, therefore, negotiating this almost crazy-making holds the key to charting the authentic pathway. Letting go of standard time seems to be closer to the guidance from the Source than the steady mind-marked realism with its predictable increments. 
Special care is needed lest the animating force of wondering disintegrate into aimless wandering. Attention needs to be devoted to evolving consciousness. Engagement with creative art involving evolutionary change offers continuing revelation. This work finds articulation in constructs such as Auerbach’s figura and Jung’s archetype. 
The God-given life force, both through continuing guidance and in renewed energy, comes in such dynamics that break through the tendency to get stuck in prescriptive literalisms and to flow with the reassuring testimony of ancestors. Let’s look closely into the subtle shifts in seasonal change, into the nuance of character development in our children as well as in the opportunities of aging, including anticipation of death.

Help in negotiating time out of time has come recently in reading Amos Wilder. In Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, Wilder talks about the radical shift: hero as lion or lamb, suffering as good or bad signal, loss as victory. The need for continuing care for the individual’s self understanding as well as for religious crises regarding changing social issues requires “a new creation” that fulfills the old and that can only find “adequate expression in a transcendental mythical statement. Yet such vision, though by its nature it dissolved ordinary relations of time, space, and causation, was nevertheless rooted in historical realities and could therefore later be translated and applied to ongoing circumstances” (Wilder, Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, pp. 151-152). Over a long period of time, good literature imitated this mythology. But then Jesus upset the prescriptions; and, consequently, interpretations and writers (and persons searching for an authentic pathway) found themselves in this “war of myths.” 

It is through images that all such orientation of the believer in an enigmatic world is conveyed. The world-understanding in question involves, of course, the heart as well as the knowing faculties… The new myth-making powers of the Christian movement meant more than an overthrow of rival myths and more than a liberation from letter and from law. It meant the portrayal of the real nature of things and of the course of existence as far as human speech could encompass such mysteries. Comparing lesser things with greater, we appropriate the myth and symbol of the New Testament by opening ourselves to its wisdom in the same order of response with which we encounter art or read poetry. Though this order of knowing is closer to that of ancient spell or visionary realization, or the world-making of the child, yet it is, for this very reason, a total and immediate kind of knowing and one that involves us totally. Wilder, Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, p. 127

Presence Alone and With

Dreams often transgress into the past as if a forty-year career hasn’t properly ended, even when final grades were done a half-decade ago. A few days ago, the night’s visitation ghosted students who were more concerned with getting points than with understanding. Will we ever learn?  

    The art of teaching inspires the quest into the inarticulate, not the adulation of dead letters. Love glides above, beyond the best of poems. Modeling has a place but truth lives in continual creation.

    

     Education, at essence, invites experience of wonder, nurtures longing for not-knowing, frees the drive further into mystery where the personally unique swirls into Union. 

     A trace or savoring of such might be felt as resonance; maybe it’s a subtle tone of love—the sense of entering a harmony, a tension that joys in the fragrance of peace. 

    In this way, my reading has recently delighted in the terrain of Teilhard de Chardin. For example, 

“When he has pursued to the end the vocation contained in all sense-perception—when his eyes have once become accustomed to the Light invisible in which both the periphery of beings and their centre are bathed—then the seer perceives that he is immersed in a universal Milieu, higher than that which contains the restlessness of ordinary, sensibly apprehended, life: a Milieu that knows no change, immune to the surge of superficial vicissitudes—a homogeneous Milieu in which contrasts and differences are toned down. As yet, he can say nothing of this diffuse Reality except that it exists, that it is enveloping and that in a mysterious way it is beatifying. It is enough for him, however, to have glimpsed its serene and luminous folds. Nothing henceforth can shake his determination to move for ever into its embrace and to find his happiness in there becoming ever more lost.” [p. 120, Writings in Time of War]