Muddy

Muddy. Last night’s dream may have offered this term as a guide to enable a confluence of currents to merge in order to yield revelation, possibly even to offer a continuing semi-substantial base (i.e., mud) for holding my own, or perhaps better for surrendering to the higher Will, whether to stand, sink, or swirl.

     One stream, as the previous blog noted, moves along with persistent musing around theodicy: trying to reconcile A with B: A—the existence of suffering and evil in the world, and B—God who is both all-love and all-powerful. That stream carries the force of several overlapping themes and sources including a number of readings relating to the biblical book of Job and extending way back some fifty years to college days when a course that I was taking required our involvement in the theatre production of MacLeish’s J.B. This stream has churned more muddy through certain life experience, particularly in relation to the death of my son fourteen and a third years ago, still weighed in the heart most every day. 

     And the dream was likely provoked by reading from two quite different genres. From fiction, Iris Murdock’s Black Prince and Owen Egerton’s recent (2017) book Hollow, described in a back-cover review:

 “a beautifully strange modern take on the ‘Book of Job,’ populated with haunting and hilarious characters worthy of Vonnegut’s best. A meditation on grief and love, Hollow is simultaneously heart-wrenching and laugh-out-loud funny.” 

Both of these books pursue existential questions of life and death, love and hate, heaven, hell, here or there, God or not. Such questions cannot be satisfied by anyone, by any way other than the individual living them out.

          And still I read because I believe in the “imaginal world” where one wonders about truth, not about facts, but about the True that runs free of literalism, materialism, and the “hardened heart.” Usually these wonderings lead into other kinds of reading focused on spirituality. 

     Not long before being presented with the muddy dream, I had been steadily reading, ten or so pages a day, in Frithjof Schuon’s The Eye of the Heart: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Spiritual Life (copyright 1997). From his final section, I was trying to absorb as much as possible of the revolutionary ideas, revolutionary because he turned keys to the kingdom upside down. Fear turns to perfection in overcoming evil. And, what of Love?

“… its most direct expression is the contemplation of the Divine Perfections which may be designated synthetically by the term ‘Beauty.’ This perspective of love is situated beyond fear and negation: instead of having painfully to reject the world on account of the ephemeral and deceptive nature of its always limited perfections, love, on the contrary, attaches itself to the divine Prototypes of these perfections, so that the world—henceforth emptied of its content, since this is to be found again infinitely in God—will be only a play of symbols and an accumulation of husks, and thus will have no further hold over man.” (pp. 170-171)

     The dream was not dramatic but perhaps just a hint to notice. Sometimes the important things turn more subtle. In the dream, a new system became available; perhaps it involved an improvement in teacher evaluation. The interesting aspect was that it could only be accessed by persons who already had in place a certain level of sophistication in their practice. The term applied to the more developed system was “muddy.” In the dream, I was surprised to hear that term because I had just encountered it somewhere else—perhaps an echo from the reading?

     In waking, perhaps still in the between space, I wondered if the reading from Schuon might only be accessible to persons who had in place a muddy readiness that’s built by certain life experience, also by reflection, and by (to use Schuon’s title for this final section of his book) “Meditation” in The Eye of the Heart.

“… if [Beauty] is most immediately graspable in the created, it is, conversely, the most difficult aspect to grasp in the Uncreate. If God’s Beauty were as easily accessible as that of creatures, the apparent contradictions of creation—the sufferings that we consider to be unjust or horrible—would be resolved of themselves, or rather, they would vanish away in total Beauty… When we look at the sufferings of this world, we must never forget that God compensates them infinitely by His Beauty; but this is beyond rational demonstration.” (171-2)

     Approached from this world especially with expectations of rational demonstration, the problem of suffering will appear “as clear as mud.” But if a sufficient foundation is built, life experiences and questionings which otherwise risk mind-splitting and heart-breaking may instead take one further on the the path or in the river of Love and Truth, Beauty, and the other names of God as they swirl eventually into the One.