Hope and Reality

Our mail carriers might think that I use books for insulation, and perhaps I do. Better if they were all the same size; then stacks could go floor to ceiling along the west-facing wall to reduce wind coming thru. Or in another sense of insulation—getting lost in the dense books provides protection against the storms and distractions of politics, sports, and such like. 

   Trouble is these packages arrive bringing their own difficulties, particularly concerning how to sort them in a findable manner. When Goodreads asks for “shelf” labels for an item read, two terms dominate my choices: mystery and spirituality. Unfortunately, the collection in the latter category overflows shelf availability, even including the new basement library. Items often go missing—walkabout? A good search might find one eventually, usually when looking in a stack of “next” that wasn’t after all. 

   It’s because “next” suffers from the un-anticipate-able. Conditions resemble weather forecasting in Texas where locals say “If you don’t like it, just wait, changes most any minute.” Thus, the next-best-to-read shifts, as it should, depending on the quality of the current text, as well as age-related factors, incoming pressure systems, etc.

   To cope with all this, we might reflect on favorite Charle Brown themes: trusting Lucy to hold the kick-off yet again or Snoopy conjuring cloud formations from the impossible position (except in comic strips) atop the doghouse roof. Can imagination sustain hope? Does hope shape reality? Is hope for Lucy a waste? Notice how “next” overlaps into the “spirituality” classification.

Pause to look out the window...

   New strategy! A book arrived yesterday, well, two actually. Good timing, for I’d just finished Mere Humanity . The new arrival, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser, becomes “next” (the other arrival went into some nearby stack). Not only does immediate reading solve the unfindable problem (hmm…hopeful cloud formation), this book also helps with understanding what goes into the category of “spirituality”! Rolheiser writes: 

“Spirituality is not something on the fringes…Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.” p. 6

“It has to give us energy and fire, so that we do not lose our vitality, and all sense of the beauty and joy of living. . . The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, is to have lost all zest for living—lying on a couch, watching football or sit-coms, taking beer intravenously! [Spirituality’s] other task, and a very vital one it is, is to keep us glued together, integrated so that we do not fall apart and die.” p. 11

So there. This category for spirituality holds the fire and the binding. It’s for a book that sustains the vitality of living and keeps the fire from going out and/or supports the grounding that won’t let us fly apart. Why read anything else…

Life and Art

 

Donald T. Williams in Mere Humanity: Chesterton, Lewis & Tolkien  reaffirms the role of art (including two of my favorites: photography and story) by exploring the writings of G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. A key theme is expressed in a letter from Tolkien:

“… Though all the crannies of the world are filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right

(used or misused). That right has not decayed:

we make still by the law in which we’re made.” [p. 42]

Williams elaborates:

“Man, in other words, is inexplicable by materialistic reductionism because of the imago Dei; we love to tell and hear stories because we are made in the image of the Creator whose creation is in fact the story we call ‘History and Redemption.’ Or in terms more in keeping with Tolkien’s defense of fairie, the human race is incapable of being fully explained or portrayed by either philosophical or literary naturalism. We are such irrepressible inventors and expressers of ourselves because we are made in the image of the Creator. Hence our outlandish notions like riding horses, our many styles of nest adorned with unnecessary arts, and our addiction to ideals like rights, goodness, truth, and beauty, which refuse to be treated as mere subjective constructs no matter how hard our secular philosophies push us to do so.” p. 44 

Oct 26, 7:27A, Moon setting

After a wonderful tour through many of the works of the three maestros of wonder, Williams concludes with an appendix on “The Church and the Postmodern Challenge” which includes this passage focusing his concern for truth when betrayed by certain postmodernists:

“truth is not merely denied as illusory, as in late relativist modernism; it is now redefined as evil. Truth for the postmodernist is and can be nothing more than a disguise for the exercise of raw power. Only an ironic infinite, regress of questions, never leading to answers, is allowed. On therefore questions everything and affirms nothing except that all affirmations are illegitimate. This is really the ultimate form of intellectual rebellion against authority, especially the authority of God.” pp. 157-8

  While this assertion might suggest a preference for rule by hard cold facts, the case of this book affirms the vital role found in the created powers of imagination, of loving the natural world, and reaching further…

The Resurrection Body

To think “body” without spirit is not. 

It’s nothing.

But nothing is thought—

How true is that… 

In last night’s dream I 

Showed off my hair, long Chestnut 

red like the tree and falling 

Leaves, dead—

Like the body nothing 

Unless 

Resurrection 

Some recent reading must have referenced John AT Robinson’s The Body and I’m now into it, interested especially (as indicated above) in the resurrection body. That looks to be the focus of part three, but already in the opening pages (as illustrated below) Robinson is building the frame for approaching the amazing possibilities.

Faith and Love, Inseparable

If you ever wonder about this thing called “love,” pretty certain that the thing must be at or near the top of value, of understanding, of making the most of relationship, religion, of life itself, The Act of Love by Rosemary Haughton might be of interest.

Faith and the “act of love” are inseparable. Faith opens onto a gap, thus making space for a commitment “beyond.” Faith thus serves to go on beyond a calcified, once living, now dead, grasp of the inarticulate, the human attempt to manage the Divine. Of course, the transcendent/manifest paradoxical reality, the pathway to God ever again draws into the wonder, extending the living experience of Love.

“The goal of Christian aspiration is God. The avowed aim of the historical Jesus, so far as we are able to discern him, was the revelation to men of the one he called his Father, and his own journey through life was a journey to the Father. The establishment of the Kingdom or ‘reign’ of God is the expected climax of human life and of the world itself, and this reign, fervently expected, is yet already present in the hearts of men by faith. But the very fact that it is by faith that men are called to enter the Kingdom shows that the notion of God implied is very different from that of the powerful, benevolent and wise director of the universe. The occurrence of faith is in the dislocation of ordinary experience, even religious experience. The entrance into faith is an entrance into darkness, an intellectual, emotional and moral blackout which results from the coincidence of two irreconcilable planes of experience. Therefore any God of whom one can form an idea, let alone an image, makes faith impossible. Such a God is an idol, and as such diverts attention from the demand of faith.

This is the point of the death-of-God type of theology, in spite of its obvious dangers as an excuse for the evasion of faith in another direction. The Nietzschean vision of man without God is not capable of providing a setting for faith, because faith requires for its fulfilment in love that element of always reaching further, beyond itself… in so far as the death of God is the death of an idol who protected people from the need for faith, it is necessary. Indeed it is not a new thing, but its necessity has been emphasized by every mystic from the author of the book of Revelation onwards.” (pp. 168-9)

As Haughton elaborates, this is the death and resurrection recurrent in daily walking, as human efforts to make concrete what cannot instead encounter renewal by grace: “The effort of the intellect to seize on the event of faith and make something of it leads directly back to the edge of the ‘gap’ and once again to the paradox of death and resurrection plunge the intellect into darkness and the presence [of the Guide] which is known too well to be grasped. So it goes on.” (p. 180)  

Illumination

Sunrise/Son Rise

"More than meets the eye”…is it art or photo? Is one real and not the other? 

Do we “see through a glass darkly” and what is seen when the veil is removed? 

Paradoxical reality. Understanding by the mind and knowing by heart. To trust in love. Taking a leap of faith…

In Act of Love, Rosemary Haughton says that in certain circumstances “the decision of faith can only be an entrance into a paradox . But, once entered, the paradox becomes an illumination, the darkness of the mentally impossible is luminous with a sense beyond the achievement of reason alone” (p. 15).

Mighty Fine!

Mighty Fine is this coffee morning. Greens and yellows making gold, leaning into the eternal question around coming or going and knowing it must be both, of course.

In The Passionate God, Rosemary Haughton explores this “exchange” of the flow of love, the natural response to Beauty, Truth, Goodness…but she also tells the trouble when refused, when the human capacity, freedom, instead of "yes," chooses "No," holding on too much out of fear or pride, lust, flat-out selfishness or on through all the deadly sins. How dare we feel other than gratitude looking out the window into such a kaleidoscope of wonder!

"The love which incarnate Wisdom so longs to give back to the source of his own life is received totally, as it is totally given and returned to its Source and Origin in one unbroken movement of ecstatic joy and thanksgiving, and that joy, that intensity of exchange of Being, is the one called Spirit. That which the Father breathes, speaks, expends is his own being, and it only is in being given. Therefore also it only is in being received, and the essence of that exchanged being (Exchange itself) is the one who from the generative embrace between Holiness and Wisdom has being as life, gives life and praises life. There is no holding, no containing, but an eternal torrent of exchanged glory which in human experience we have to separate out and call “love” to distinguish it from other human exchanges. But it is “love” because it is. This is reality, whose nature is indeed love, totally given, totally received, totally given back. All else that we call reality is “made of” that, and creation is the natural exaggeration of a love which must always love more" (pp. 172-173).

 

Love of the Autumnal

 

As noted last time, recent reading has featured the works of John A.T. Robinson (Honest to God and The Human Face of God). Near the close of the latter work, he writes:

“‘Who is Christ for us today?’ I have suggested elsewhere that the gospel passages with peculiarly compelling power for our generation are those, like the Sheep and the Goats just alluded to, the walk to Emmaus or the final appearance of Jesus by the lakeside, which ‘tell of one who comes unknown and uninvited into the human situation, disclosing himself as the gracious neighbour before he can be recognized as Master and Lord’. In this, as in other respects, our thinking today has, I am convinced, to begin ‘from below’ and move from immanence to transcendence, from relationships to revelation, from the Son of Man to the Son of God, rather than the other way round.” (p. 239)

     A few pages earlier, Robinson asserts that “the starting-point is the transformation of human relationships” and that this comes into play as we engage anew the great mythic themes, as we 

“relate atonement to experience—justification, sanctification, sacrifice, ransom, satisfaction and the rest… What do we mean in terms of actual human experience by saying that ‘in Christ’ there is perfect (?) freedom, complete (?) release from fear and self, no (?) condemnation, final (?) victory over sin and death, unconditional (?) community, a new act of  relation, etc., etc.? How do we make real what the dimension of transcendence adds in this realm, what openness to grace means, or to the prevenient love of God, or to the power and fellowship of the Spirit? It is from ‘the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings’ in the present that the Christian has to start—and then go on to speak of these in secular rather than in religious terms. In the process he may—or he may not—be able to refer back to the myth or theories of ‘the’ Atonement in such a way that men say, ‘Oh, that’s what that meant!’” (p. 232, 233). 

     In this passage, Robinson footnotes with a recommendation to consider also the work of Rosemary Haughton, and this prompted me to pick up a volume already at hand: The Passionate God. Indeed, Haughton extends this project of finding the transcendent themes in everyday life, particularly relating the incarnation to the experiences of “romanticism.”

“The other thing about Romantic love which could only have sprung from Christian roots (however little the gardeners of Romance realized this) is that the doctrine is essentially dynamic. It is about an energy that smashes through the surface of everyday awareness and makes possible an exchange of spiritual power and knowledge which not only penetrates the lovers through every aspect of body, mind and spirit, but reaches far beyond them to transform other relationships and the very aspect of the material world. It is clear, also, that it does not come from the lovers but ‘enters’ into them, and having done so it demands to be used, to be given and taken, to act and affect, to change and be changed. It discovers its meaning in the response to it; it can only be known in being given.” (p. 47)

The poignant beauty of turning and falling leaves in this autumn often tilt and whirl with these wounds and wonders of transcendence, incarnation, transformation, death and resurrection…