Grace in a Gray Sky

 

there is grace in a gray sky

drops syncopated, minor notes 

winding, tiny wind-streets for white birds

who live for water

Image courtesy of MaryLynne Wrye, still from I Fly Over, 2022, https://www.marylynnewrye.com/i-fly-over. 

The Faces of Silence

There is the Empty Silence,
when the little hands waving out the car window disappear down the road
and suddenly the home seems a loosely-knit box of nothingness,
and it must be filled by music or the washing of dishes;
when the streets are empty at three am
and there is still a long way to go;
when train times pass, the station suddenly bereft of purpose;
or the long winter months in age or illness.

 

There is the Full Silence, 

when the last note of the piano has dissipated 

on a particularly beautiful piece 

and before the applause begins;

when a crowd is waiting in solidarity 

for the screen to flicker 

and for the talking head to explain; 

or around the dying person’s bedside, 

just as the soul leaves the pupils lax. 

The Holy Spirit revolves around the Fullest Silence: 

when the Logos descends, the Silence grows heavy. 

The priest bends low over the bread and wine, 

his voice lowers into the Secrets: 

the centrifugal Spirit closes in on the altar 

becoming the naval of the universe. 

The bells ring out,

like a best man tapping his wine glass with a knife.

We can match the air of our inner self 

to all those around us and to the still, Silent Lord;

those who have cultivated the silence of the heart 

can answer the golden call.

Dido in Hades

Dido, once me, believed 

love-vows could be witnessed by the storm:

Breaking surf, unbroken, whipping wind

raising a rain shower—

the will of the gods an encircling wave

bringing the torch that the bridegroom gave.

Aeneas, steel, countered: 

"Gods live in the mind and in the storm:

Phoibos' flame transcends the Shaker's swell,

balancing blood's fervor"—

his clear-cut piety a glass to fire,
reveal, and drown my funeral pyre.

I, shade, then existed

so the weather was nothing to me:

Waning sliver-moon, airless, dead night

cloaking a soul inured—

what harrowing God comes now, a flaming turn,

straining my flint-will twixt bend or burn?

The Light Garden

Something about being small children 

in a Himalayan light garden, 

flying our dreams, simple kites, from rooftops,  

goes beyond grief. 

You caught my heart because you were born there, 

among the barren and brown-shouldered mountains, 

a tiny baby like a star in the deep, empty sky. 

Light, falling unbroken by tree or tower, 

fell upon our necks in playful swipes, 

its dance in the endless sky a festival in Eden

for archangels, not for missionary, Western children

rearranging our Western doll houses 

on the empty plateaus below, 

playing fields of vanquished, exiled arch-demons. 

When we left Afghanistan, 

our metal wings hesitantly lifting in the air— 

I dreamt over and over of fire, 

our cradled loves burning back into dirt, 

the curling, tortured remains of houses and hills crying out:

You can never come back.

Like the still waters of Band-e Amir, blue light-catchers, 

you look across at me in the flames, 

the way Afghan eyes still stare within my burning wilderness, 

a look of ancient purity, sorrow mixed with mercy. 

Infamous Article 1, Question 92, Prima Pars and the Beauty of Complementarity

The question of a wife's submission to her husband is a complex one, but perhaps it comes down to this: what does experience with reality tell you? 

This is the rub, because our experience is not infallible; there are deeper mysteries and reality is more complex than we can grasp as individuals, and if we place too much emphasis on our own understanding (and very intelligent people tend to do this more readily), we can miss the deeper truth. For example, Aristotle's methodology, though a great step forward in human thought, was not infallible. He worked from the observable, physical world to the metaphysical, and attempted to show the fundamental order of the cosmos born of the synthesis between biological nature and metaphysical nature; later Aquinas followed this lead in his own great synthesis of Christian doctrine flowering from the Jewish Torah and, in part, their thought, and Aristotle and Plato. It is essential to discover how Aquinas derived his own methodology leading to political principles, because in a true medieval sense, Aquinas sees the cosmos as a harmonized whole, from the physical to the highest levels of metaphysical truth. His synthesis is deeper than just between the ancient Greeks and Christian thought, but an attempt to align Jewish and Greek thought, both streams a hermeneutic lens to understanding the New Testament and the Tradition of the Church. So, we first start with the Greeks, specifically Aristotle, whom Thomas simply calls "The Philosopher"; I always "hear" him inflecting "the," "the Philosopher," indicating that Aristotle is the primary Greek, pre-Christian epistemology and methodology upon which he will rely. 

This methodology starts long before Aristotle, however:  I believe it to be the essence of "the Greek miracle": the Ionian Pre-Socratics are generally characterized by a major shift in epistemology, from relying solely on mythology, a dependence on what was handed down or given to humans by the gods, to a search for foundational, constant, discoverable laws of nature. In other words, they somehow took the Promethean fire of knowledge into their own hands, a growing belief that they lived in a cosmos, a universe ordered by fundamental laws of nature, not a battleground of whimsical personalities one step away from chaos. Thales of Miletus, for example, says, "Everything is full of gods"; at face value, this may seem like an affirmation of the more primitive, Hesiodic and Homeric worldview, but it is most often interpreted as meaning that all things, from the observable to the metaphysical, have a certain ordering towards purpose or end, from a rock to the gods; this interpretation is upheld in the words of Thales' student Anaximander: "The origin of all things is the apeiron (the boundless or the infinite), and it is from this that all things arise and return." The apeiron becomes both an origin and end, creating a law that is not based on a changeable, Zeus-like character who distributes law based often on personal desire or persuasion leading to the supplicant cults. 

Aristotle is a descendant of this Pre-Socratic and Socratic insight; his hylomorphic system is based on the dual foundation that everything in existence is made for a purpose and that this purpose, or telos, is observable first in the physical world, all knowledge beginning first in apprehension through the senses, and then concomitantly observable in the rational, the metaphysical, through conceptualization and universalization of natures (substantial forms). Mathematics, of course, is one, if not the, major jumping point from physical to metaphysical, which is one reason, perhaps, mathematics engendered ratio-religious cults. Aristotle, based on observation of the natural world and the search for the fundamental laws of nature, created his great works, The Physics and the compilation we label The Metaphysics. 

The foundational nature of this shift from mythological imposition of "order" to rational, scientific discovery of law cannot really be overstated, and Aquinas saw the truth in it, perhaps seeing a way to prove through observation and argument the Creator's order: eternal law, divine law, natural law in a great symphony, with which human behavior and law, to be considered truly just and teleological, producing salvation and happiness, must harmonize. Interpretation of Aquinas' thought on any subject, therefore, has to take Aristotle's method and conclusions into account, and it seems apparent that Aquinas' method relies at least partly upon the extrapolation from the physical to the metaphysical, synthesizing this with that handed down from Jewish and Christian thought. 

In the Summa, on the question of a woman's nature, however, I believe Aquinas follows Aristotle into some error based on faulty observation of biology. In the First Part, Question 92, Article 1, Aquinas indicates that the woman is made as a helper for man in terms of generation, as a passive vessel to his active seed. This was built on the Aristotelian idea of the passive and active principle present also at the fundamental level of logic (prime matter activated by form). However, the biology upon which this is all based is simply wrong: a woman also has a "seed" and an active part in generation just as a man does; in the sexual act, the man does play a more active role, but not in actual conception, and we don't fully understand the possibility that woman's state of mind and her body can, at times, also affect conception, even more subtly than and beyond the variations in fertile times of the month. Therefore, early observations in biology which helped build an entire physical, political, and metaphysical structure of thought about women were not infallible, and so there may be other areas which are also faulty. 

Furthermore, women are in some ways more than just active, equal partners in the physical generation of the human race; indeed, her part is greater: a woman is born with her eggs, and so a mother who has a girl in her womb is responsible not just for the continuation of one of her own eggs, but also an entire new potential generation of human beings...this is a form of stability and foundation for "like to like" (in Aquinas' words) that the male semen does not have: his seed is being generated and dies in cyclical flux with variations on a theme in terms of DNA. Moreover, the child does not fully "leave" the mother, as shown by fetal microchimerism, the process by which part of her child's DNA stays with her for decades, perhaps even for the rest of her life. Women therefore do not just provide a vessel for future human beings, they are an active and continuing foundation for them. In a slightly ironic twist, creating a dynamic hierarchy, a man could be in some sense considered a woman's helpmate as she bears this great task for the good of others, for the good of society and the common good of earth and heaven. In terms of a woman playing an active role in both realms, Mary Theotokos is the highest example of this, and her fiat is a sign of an active part in the generation of Christ. Was she an equal part? Vis à vis the Holy Spirit, of course she was not—not equal in nature. However, I venture to say that in His Divine humility, the Holy Spirit asked her permission, which is an indication of His granting her equality in this decision; her seed was definitely needed, and it is fascinating to think that Christ's human DNA came only from her. This is why spiritual, emotional, political, or even physical (as in rape) domination is so egregious: it is a sign of one who treats the woman as a passive unequal, and this is a powerful instance of the difference between the pagan gods and the True God: the rape and seduction of women and goddesses in the mythologies, the temple prostitution, etc, is in stark contrast to how God interacts with Mary. God would have known that this would speak volumes to the pagan world: a woman is certainly to be treated as an equal by men, if even God asks permission of a woman to impregnate her.

What was derived from the faulty understanding of generation? Aquinas in the section mentioned above seems to indicate that the male is the template human, which would make sense if the male carried the only genetic seed for offspring; the woman would be simply a vessel for the seed to carry on, and because the male seed in the case of a female child would not be a "true image" of the male, originally human seed, she is, in effect, a defective male. This sets into motion a principle upon which many other conclusions have been drawn. 

One is the idea that women are simply not rational to the same level as men; also from Aristotle, the idea that women are not capable of the highest activity of human life, the political life, may have been born from two physical sources: the generative, active principle in conception echoing the active formative cause versus the passive, less intelligible matter, and the cyclical, changing body of the woman through menstruation. Men were considered consistent in their physical life; women were considered unstable, weaker physically, and prone to emotional fluctuations. This has some truth to it, but hormonal changes are not necessarily indicators of rational qualities or absolute capability for participation in political society as leaders in certain areas. Besides, beyond childrearing years, women become emotionally similar to men in many cases, as the hormonal fluctuations recede—and many women do not fluctuate emotionally to any noticeable degree; the more serious emotional fluctuations are often a result of hormonal imbalances, just as many men are overly-prone to the instability of aggression due to, perhaps, a hormonal imbalance. 

Also, Aristotle lived during a period in which women were oppressed: kept from education and opportunity to develop their rational faculties, their lives and especially their intellects were often atrophied and even discouraged; as late as nineteenth-century England, Jane Austen makes the quip, in one of her letters, about the "unfortunate quality of intelligence" possessed by any woman hoping for a good marriage. Aquinas, though, should have been more aware: as Regine Pernoud shows masterfully in Women in the Days of the Cathedrals, women in the early medieval period, for hundreds of years across Europe, held positions of leadership: landowners, abbesses for both men and women, judges, educators, etc.. Hildegard Von Bingen, who lived at the height of this Christian development and freedom for women, is one such example: she was a polymath, a genius in a number of fields, which belies the idea that women cannot, by nature, rise to great rational heights. It was only with the return of the Roman law in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that women began to lose their places in political life; Pernoud relates this with some sadness, because she acknowledges, as is obvious to anyone, that masculine gifts and feminine gifts for society are not the same, and with the feminine relegated to silence and obscurity, much was lost. Therefore, like Aristotle who lived in a culture that did not give women opportunity to develop properly as fully rational human beings, Aquinas may also have had a faulty experience of the capability of a woman; perhaps like the Greeks and Romans before him, he had a certain prejudice, leading him to declare the feminine, according to physical, bodily nature, defective in comparison to a man. 

Again, one should, albeit cautiously, look at direct experience. Anyone who has taught at the college level, once men have caught up in terms of development, can see clearly that the young woman sitting in a class is as fully rational as the young man sitting next to her.   

Of course, Aquinas makes it clear that according to the spiritual, by grace, women are equal to men. However, this seems to raise an issue: if the body is the form of the soul, and a woman's body is a defective male body, then why not her soul? Aquinas seems to indicate "by grace" and so, like Luther's doctrine of grace covering sin, perhaps Aquinas is indicating that God's grace covers the defective human soul of the female. It is as if women are, by nature, retarded. However, does God make something defined by the defection from another thing? 

This is where I feel that John Paul II's Theology of the Body becomes, perhaps, a true development of the issues in Aquinas' and even Augustine's thinking on this question. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, John Paul II creates a synthesis, a leveled, ordered system of thought based on, or including the physical, in the sense that the physical is semiotically related to the metaphysical: the physical is a sign of greater realities, as it seemed to be for both Aristotle and Aquinas. However, John Paul II also sees analogically, namely that the human in spiritual, rational, and physical nature is also created imago Dei, to be an image of God, and that the complementarity of masculine and feminine into a unity is a sign of what it means to transcend individuality in an out-flowing of love; therefore John Paul II sees not a hierarchy of inequality, defectiveness, and passivity versus activity, but rather self-gift, both sexes imaging this essential characteristic of God. The physical bodies of a man and a woman are made for unity, for a movement out of original solitude and into community, both through the conjugal act and through conception of a new person, the beginnings of a society. Physically alone, the male sexual member calls for another; it is incomplete; by itself it makes no sense, just as the female reproductive structure calls for another. This deeper, more biologically-correct understanding of male and female bodies can correct and deepen our understanding of the roles that men and woman are potentially called to in society, both the society of the family and the larger society. The sexes need each other, and are not fully complete without the other: thus the principle of complementarity rather than political hierarchy. 

Complementarity indicates fundamental equality: without the other puzzle piece, the entire puzzle is incomplete: isn't this what Adam indicates in the Garden, and why God gave him one who could be his helpmate, his friend, his other half? Would Adam have been satisfied with a less rational being, a defective male? Would God have made a being at the crown of creation as defective, reaching back down towards the animal, the irrational? This does not follow the pattern of Genesis, which moves from the nonliving, to the living, to the animate, to the sentient, to the rational. To end with something defective seems to contradict the arc of Genesis, and patterns like this in the Torah are paramount: no detail is unimportant. 

The next question I always get is this: What about St. Paul? This actually, and rightly, brings up the other epistemological method that Aquinas was synthesizing with the Aristotelian: the Judeo-Christian. St. Paul, steeped in the Judaism of his time as a Pharisee, would have thought like a Jew and therefore taught like a Jew of first-century Palestine. Just a caveat: I am not arguing for the historical-critical method of reading the New Testament, denigrating the role that the Holy Spirit played in producing the New Testament; I am simply saying that St. Paul would most likely have been using the epistemological method he knew from Jewish tradition to teach, one which is almost the polar opposite of Aristotle, though not contrary to it in the end. In fact, Aquinas is one Christian thinker who sees these two epistemological methods as complementary; this makes Aquinas' synthesis all the more admirable, though I am arguing that these two methodologies being different can create confusion about the nature of a woman in the teaching of St. Paul. 

What is a synthesis, a point of agreement, between Aristotelian thought and Jewish thought (at the time of St. Paul)? The most basic is that there is a cosmos, a work of art that, in both the whole and parts, is teleological. It is not just that individual parts have purpose, from the tiniest quark to the greatest angel, but that they are all created to be in harmony with a Prime Mover, or, for the Jews, the transcendent Creator, who is a Person. This is what allowed Aquinas to synthesize the two traditions of epistemology. However, in order to more deeply understand the nature and role of a woman, we have to know which tradition we're interpreting. What is the major difference? 

The starting point. For the Jews, this was not observation of the physical world or the use of human rational laws as exemplified in the mathematical language of beauty and order to derive metaphysical laws, working backwards toward a Prime Mover; for them, all deep, true understanding began with the Torah, or, more specifically, God speaking to them directly through both word and action: it was the imitation of God; it was beginning with the revelation of God, the ultimate understanding of His law given to them in the experience of God's power, His care, His presence, and finally the codification of this relationship in the Ten Commandments from which all other laws were derived. The Jews therefore were unique: they were the bride of God, His children, and He taught them truth directly, from which they derived their religious, social, and political structures. How did this derivation happen? There are a number of means, but comparison, specifically analogy, were common and powerful tools. We see Jesus using this in the parables, one of his most important teaching tools; these generally fall under the "Midrash," the creation of new teachings based both in the familiar world and in subtle teachings of the Torah, connecting them to teach deep theological truths to a limited human mind. And Jesus also structures His Gospel on the Torah: He states that he came "to fulfill the Law, not to abolish it" and to deepen understanding of the Law through statements in the Beatitudes starting with "you have heard it said...but I say...": each time not contradicting the law but rather showing the original, deepest meaning of the Law in line with whom God is. Another method, "Binyan Av," creates analogous application of the Torah to new teaching about human life. In other words, a case can be made that St. Paul, starting with not the Torah, but with Christ's Gospel, was yet using the same analogical methods: creating new teaching about marriage by analogy to Christ and the Church, simultaneously explaining more fully the nature of Christ's Body through marriage as a familiar sign, and asking couples in turn to be witnesses, or signs, of this reality: to be a testimony of the Deeper Reality of Christ and the Church to the outside world. 

How, then, do we read St. Paul about the submission of a wife to her husband? One can read this a couple of ways, but it depends, I think, on how one comes to the reading: if based on the assumption that women are defective men as Aquinas seems to teach, then the submission becomes a political necessity, the wiser (more rational) ruling over the less wise (making women just a little more wise than the children in the house). If all this were true, then it would be self-evident that a man rule absolutely over his household; it would make him a "little god."  However, conversely, if one comes to the reading with the lens of complementarity and self-gift of two equals—equal by nature rationally and spiritually—then suddenly, the submission becomes a spiritual sign for something much greater: the Church as Bride, Christ as Bridegroom. Christ is, by nature, greater than His Bride, but this is because He is God. This is why I believe St. Paul says, "...but I am speaking here of the Church...." The Christian marriage between individuals becomes a sign of the submission and humility present in the Trinity, and the submission and humility of the Bride of Christ—and yet she is also His Body, one whom He loves and cares for as His own. When one studies the analogy, synthesizing the Bride and also the Body, one can ask: is the head, a part of the body, greater than the whole body? This is the great and surprising thing that St. Paul teaches about the nature of Church: Christ really does raise Her to be be one with Him; He sees Her as a continuation of Himself in the world, and perhaps St. Paul, following Christ's astounding teaching on marriage, "they are one flesh," is using this idea to show just how much Christ loves us: "May they be one with Me." However, in terms of individual marriages between people, an analogy has limits, because this is, of course, different from an individual wife and husband: many a sinful husband has had a saint as a wife, one who has interceded for him, in a sense, helping to save and in marriage, challenging him to cleanse his soul; of course, the reverse is also true. This is just one example demonstrating that the analogy of the Bride and an individual bride, like all analogies, has its limits and the higher object of the sign cannot be imposed completely on the sign itself, because the sign is, in a sense, too small; the sign can only point to the higher reality in a partial way (or the sign and the higher reality would, in effect, be the same thing). 

Therefore, what is this submission in a marriage? Within and beyond individual equality, it is a sign, a Christian witness of the nature of the Church and the love Christ has for her, as His Body. The husband is to be a sign of Christ, who gave His own life for the Church, who serves her in deep humility, a servant leader; the wife is the Body in receptivity and response: not Aristotle's passivity, but Mary's fiat. However, this is not something determined by physical and rational natures, but analogical to it, which makes the "self-gift" out of what St. John Paul II calls "original solitude," all the more beautiful because it is a choice; choice, free-will, upon which the existence of love depends, is a resounding modus operandi of God, even with His own Son. God makes human nature complementary, needing an other, made to be complete in another. This is not a defect, but a sign of love and fecundity through that love: it is the desiring of the good, of our completeness in another, creating the majesty and beauty of creation, and it is, in a sense, analogous to the ever-flowing self-gift of the Trinity, a mutual complementarity and submission of equals. 

Does it mean that roles are absolutely fluid and that there is no real difference between men and women? No. Using the Jewish analogical method, the great Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov writes in Woman and the Salvation of the World that the role of a man is that of a John the Baptist, or, I would add, a St. Joseph: he who, through kenosis, is fathering through emptying of the self for the good of another; Evidokimov says that the role of a woman is Mary Theotokos, the reception of God; on the human level, a deep and personal reception of the other. A man also, as a priest, has a specific role of alter Christus, another Christ. This, to me, indicates a certain spiritual role, a headship; I believe all men carry within them this deep, Christlike kenosis, which indicates servant leadership (think of Christ washing feet). However, all Christians, following the assertion " in Christ there is no male or female," are equally called and equally capable of becoming Christlike. What about the particular roles of men in the family and in society?  Speaking from biological observation, the Greek method, men tend to compartmentalize more easily (interestingly, perhaps a result of a chemical "wash" partially separating the hemispheres of the brain at about six weeks of life) and can therefore set their feelings and a complex, holistic picture aside in order to see the fundamental choices at stake. In this, they may offer a situation the ability to empty the self and simply serve the highest good: we see this in defense of family and country. Women, on the other hand, are generally more consistently personal and can take into account even tiny details; thus, they do not as often fall into reductionism: all these ideas are, of course, generalities. However, they may point to certain roles in a situation pertaining to those differences. In the end, though, even these differences are not in a strict hierarchy, but rather are dynamic roles, depending on the circumstances, and I believe, work most effectively in a relationship of complementarity. 

With the principle of complementarity, many beautiful areas to explore are opened: as St. Edith Stein wrote, society needs both the genius of the feminine and the genius of the masculine in all areas; the feminine tends to see slightly differently, hers a nurturing, personalist sight; the masculine a powerful categorical sight and an awareness of danger. These are, of course, massive generalizations, but like Edith Stein, I believe that we need women lawyers and doctors and politicians as well as mothers, and we need male counterparts in all areas to fully serve the common good, as well as fathers. 

Zechariah

Zechariah was the high priest that year.

That year, like so many before it, in the turn of the land and the flight of birds,

the wet and the green, the dry and the brown;

Zechariah had the rope tied around him,

in case he had to be pulled, a corpse,

from the wrath of the Lord,

the rope a last link to the world.

His bare feet slid across the marble,

the cracks between stones softly cramping his thick robes

stiff with the breastplate bearing the stones of the Houses of Israel,

under the tiered turban,

under the finely woven wool,

the smooth marble under his poor and bare feet like Moses' feet before the bush of fire:

he offered the fire in the Holy of Holies,

the sound of the temple singers creeping in like ineffectual smoke 

along the curved sinews of the rope.

The thoughts of his heart were boulders, rocks,

falling, rattling, cracking the deep silence.

He again tended laying of the incense and the fire,

lay prostrate before the altar.

Silence approached.

Sounds of the singing ceased.

The silence was too great,

the fire and lamps too strong,

and the color was—

more like the blue line of light in a curling wave of clear water,

dancing.

"Zechariah."

"How can I be sure of this?"

The light stilled, hardened, spiking cold like a star.

Zechariah stumbled out of the Holy of Holies;

as he entered the outer courtyard,

he saw that many hands had taken hold of the rope,

beginning to pull him towards

their frightened faces,

their fervent faces,

their waiting,

ever waiting.

His enforced silence,

months only listening, and watching, and praying, 

folded in his deep shame,

he a priest, he so favored!

Ineffectual sight.

Now he must be silenced

before the great mystery dancing inside Elizabeth.

Slowly, as the spark set her aglow,

he spoke: "His name is John."

A Journey to the Beloved's Goal

It is raining today, off and on; at times, the trees toss and the house is beat upon by water flung sideways. This mirrors what I find on my screen when I look through pixels to what is happening in the world: it seems, to many of us, that the stream of evil is beyond us, like a mountain of grey, slimy water breaking and receding, each tide higher and higher. Many of us are wondering where God is. We feel on the edge of something monstrous, beyond our power and control...all does seem lost when we see a parade in Spain including cross-dressed children primed for abuse, when magisterial doctrine that keeps us sane is held in a jugular grip by those charged with protecting it, when we see the despair on the faces of the lockdown-poor in our land, when we see widespread anxiety about the encroachment of shadowy forces of power bolstered by fears of AI and transhumanism, when genocide is no longer news, when death seems to reign. Indeed, indeed, in our day, it seems that Satan "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born": it seems that Yeat's great poem is no longer a nihilist's imagination but a living image. It also feels, perhaps, that we are the disciples wondering what to give as bread, and Christ is turning to us, saying, "What do you have?" We know instinctively this is a moment of faith. But we find that we don't know what that means in the face of so much evil.

Is faith an intellectual assent, or an emotional one? What if it is neither, at least neither alone? What if it is more than the sum total of the parts of us? Imagine Jesus traveling along a dusty path with His disciples, teaching peripatetically, their questions coming fast and furious; He stops, and suggest they sit for a spell, to rest, and to hear him; the stopping to hear indicating something they need to hold in their hands, something weighted such that it requires the ground to be still with them (it is recounted in all four Synoptic Gospels almost word-for-word, indicating something they all deemed essential): "For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." Imagine: the words hit them with the weight of worlds, of the Creator; each of them—small, insignificant to the world they inhabited, but nascently the most important in history for their being chosen by Him—tries to hold the weight. 

"Do you mean...What do you mean?" 

They can't hold onto it. Can any of us move mountains? What was He saying? What is this faith? Certainly not just an intellectual assent to doctrine; certainly not an emotional state kept alive by praise music pulsing through speakers on the way to another work day. No human intellect, no human emotion, has the power to move a mountain, even if this is a colloquial phrase meaning "large problem." Dots are not connecting here; Christ often, though, spoke of the power of His healing in terms almost of a communion of intent with the other: "Your faith has healed you"; "He could not [my emphasis] do works of power in Nazareth, because of their lack of faith in Him." There's manifestly, then, something more to faith than just believing that God exists, or feeling it, which fades like the high at the end of a retreat when daily life asserts itself again. 

The great biblical scholar, John L. McKenzie, wrote astounding words about faith in his book on the New Testament, The Power and the Wisdom: "As we look at the act of faith, we see that the degree of surrender to Jesus grows . . . it is surrender of self to the extent that one buries one's personal life in the life of Jesus and ceases to exist as a detached unit of humanity" (169-170).  Here again we see the indication of communion and power flowing forth from that communion; yet---what is this communion, this faith that means that each of us, the faithful, would "move mountains" and "do greater works than these"? McKenzie, a scholar who could dance almost effortlessly on the razor's edge of historical context and mythos, that deep underlying, unchanging, supra-historical reality so essential to understanding the Divine, claims that we must look at the Gospel-writer's words, and indeed, the Lord's own words, first as part of an historical context—that of the Torah, the life of Israel—and yet, at the same time, we must hold onto the tension that the Jews lived in from the time they waited, in the words of the great Martin Buber, at the foot of the navel of the cosmos (Sinai) for God to establish a relationship with them, a family relationship like none other. We too must live in the tension of time and eternity as we listen to the words of Christ about faith. 

If, then, Christ is speaking about the mustard seed to Jews at a time in history when His terms, his teaching, would make the most sense in light of the Torah and the faith journey of the Jewish people, perhaps a look at what faith might mean in that context will help us ground our understanding of how faith can indicate a power in communion, in a surrender of self. Rabbi Fohrman of Aleph Beta gives us the word in Hebrew for "faith": in key places, turning points in Exodus, it is "emunah" in our Arabic script. The rabbi takes us back to the moment when the Jews— having seen God rescue them from Egypt and miraculously get them across a sea, feed them with bread showing up on the ground day-by-day, meet them at Mt. Sinai, allow them to experience Him speaking with Moses, receive the Law from His own hand—were at the edge of the Promised Land. Spies had just returned and reported milk and honey, yes, but also giants. Fear had set in and many complained that "God has sent us here to kill us"; "Would that we could return to Egypt." Like a record forcibly spun backwards, their shrill tones scratched, undid all: the song of care, the protection, the relationship that had been built over time and struggle in the desert. They accuse God; it is the antithesis of "emunah," or "faith," because this word in the Hebrew is closest to the English "steadfast." 

Therefore, faith is not just a single moment, for the human who lives in time. It is, at the least, a process in time: at the greatest degree, the degree correlated with the Creator and the Word of that Creator, what is it? Rabbi Fohrman immediately dispels the notion that, at the edge of the Promised Land, the Israelites had lost intellectual belief, for they had gazed on each other's faces in the light of a pillar of fire, in the light like horns radiating from the forehead of Moses. Their failure was something else, something darker, which requires some unpacking, with the help of the rabbi. 

Belief in God, he says, is the easy part. St. Paul would agree: "For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Even Pharaoh, who went head-to-head with God, at the moment of his army being drowned, believed in God's existence. No. It is what comes after that defines faith, emunah. It is what comes after the wedding vows that determines emunah, or fidelity, trustworthiness, steadfastness. Vis à vis God, is this on us, as humans? 

It is most like a wooing on the part of a bridegroom, resulting via both parties in a deep-flowing marriage over years. The rabbi writes about Moses confronting the Israelites in their lack of emunah: "'In this desert you have seen how God has carried you, like a man will carry his child' . . .  Moses appeals to their experience: 'You have grounds for faith, but you in this thing have failed.'" What is their experience, beyond anecdotes? In the beginning, before the unleavened departure, God had told them, through Moses, that He had heard their cries. He had empathy for them. To have trust in someone, we need to know he cares for us, cares for our struggles and pain. Later, on the windswept, sandy dead-end with an army thundering toward them, they had seen God's power to save them; to trust another fully, we must know that he has the power to act for us in need, that he will do what is needed, will "have our back." Finally, at the foot of the great mountain, Sinai, they had dialogue with God; they had known, through Moses, that God understood them, their needs, their humanness.

When I know you have empathy, power, and understanding, I can trust you with my life. Yet, like a marriage, it is a choice for both parties—it is a covenant of love and trust. Rabbi Fohrman puts it best:

When you steadfastly place your fate in the hands of someone who loves you, when you abandon yourself to them, you achieve a dizzying kind of intimacy with them. That intimacy, as rewarding as it is, is also scary. It is a kind of leaving yourself behind, a kind of merging unabashedly with another. There is no more hiding, what of my sense of self, am I losing it all to you?

These words echo those of John McKenzie, when he describes the faith Christ means:  "It is surrender of self to the extent that one buries one's personal life in the life of Jesus and ceases to exist as a detached unit of humanity." Just as this Catholic scholar and Jewish rabbi echo each other's words about faith, does Christ's life echo the process of God's relationship with the Israelites in their archetypal journey of emunah? For Jew and Christian, regardless, it is indeed a leap—often, in the darkness, most trusting when we do not feel the empathy, the power, the understanding: in these times, we have to remember, to recall, the times when we have known these three pillars of faith, and hang on to them, because we are limited human beings, and God knows the Long Game. Nevertheless, God always continues to reach out to make this emunah possible. The last, greatest, continuing iteration of this Divine courtship is the Incarnation.

Christ is the expression, the Word, of God. His personhood is of course ineffable, but if we attempt to approach it via Aristotelian and Thomistic language, He is the form of God as expressed, discernible to us limited human beings both in the creative act of the cosmos and in the material level as embodied, as a fellow human being. The Word, the expression of the formal cause of everything, is, in a sense, the communication of the Father from all eternity until now. Love desires communication, communion, and God loves us; God incarnated, suffering, dying, rising is the ultimate, final communication of love, allowing for the power of God, the Spirit, to make His home in the human being. Therefore, the reality of the Son of Man is, rather than an echo of the God in the Sinai wilderness, the same God wooing His creatures over and over into a marriage of trust and covenant. The God we meet in the Gospels is overflowing with empathy, not just in an overall way, as when He wept over Jerusalem: He leans into the dust to gather scattered, despised whores and invalids; He hears and turns toward the high-pitched whine of Bartimaeus on the road to Jericho; He weeps with Mary and Martha peering after their beloved over edge of the death-lands; in a lighter moment, one can almost hear His chuckle of admiration as He feels the bits of straw and paneling fall on him from an opened roof, sees the pallet descending toward him, surrounded heaven-ward by concerned faces of friends. His is a particular empathy for each person, a love-pity that His saints exude for each person placed in their path. Power? It flowed from Him, through Him, to those who counted on His empathy, knew it, hoped for it, risked it in the glare of the town square. He had power to help, to save, to salvage. Did He understand, did He show He understood? The answers to these questions are so obvious in the Gospels that it almost seems to me now, recounting, that these three criteria, pillars, of faith were what He came to show—not through an intermediary like Moses—in particular moments, to particular people, to a particular Church, as He desires to do for all time: "I will always be with you." 

The Gospels, then, are a story of God creating the conditions for emunah, for Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, making possible that steadfast trust in a Father, emunah precious as the nard poured on his head by one who loved Him. But I think there's more: the mustard-seed-mountain-moving faith. When Christ showed Himself in full glory on Mt. Tabor, two great ones of faith were with Him: Moses and Elijah. Somehow, they were icons of full faith, and they rejoiced to see the Word in all His glory, as fully human and fully Divine, able to relate to individuals in a new, deeper, more personal way. Both these men, in their days, moved mountains: they surrendered all to God, became, in one sense, so given that they shone with the very glory of God, Moses as he came down from Sinai, Elijah as he was swept up in fire. 

But this, next to what Christ could do for us, is just a precursor. St. Paul prays it well in Philippians: "That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his death." And in His last discourse, Christ prays to the Father that "these might be one with Us, as We are one." Emunah, the consummation of trust, means that I am no longer just me: I believe in Him, I am no longer a "detached human." This is only possible through Christ's complete identification with our humanity, His ransoming us from the pomp and power of Satan. 

This is scary. Who am I, then? Will I, like the Israelites, in times of fear, blame God in some way, act like His actions in my life are somehow lacking empathy, power, or understanding? Indeed, there is much around us that seems to require more practical, understandable power. This is not new, though, except perhaps in degree. I think of the comedian Stephen Fry, whom I both pity (he seems a man of great sorrow, like many great comedians) and admire, who scoffed on Irish television at the idea of a God who can allow a child to suffer...yes, as Fry admitted later in an interview with Jordan Peterson, it is Ivan's argument in The Brothers Karamazov. Fry, as Ivan did, has lost all faith, because he does not see empathy, power, or understanding: and so he has lost sight of God. Understandable. 

The response, as was suggested to Fry by Peterson, is not an argument, but a person. In The Brothers K, that person is Alyosha, Ivan's younger brother, who, at the end of the novel, surrenders to the ground in ecstasy because he loves God; I would add that Alyosha, spreading the power of goodness around him, is who he is because of Father Zosima, his mentor, who traveled the road of emunah: repentance, the self-emptying of all reliance and care for the power of this world, and the absolute trust in the empathy, power, and understanding of Christ: Alyosha sees through Father Zosima a glimpse of the deep, brooding, maternal hovering of the Spirit, the power of God: the long-game, the understanding beyond understanding, the reasons that only the heart of God can know, the final, loving good at the end of all things, the meaning of pain, of humiliation, severe mercies on the journey to the Promised Land. 

Who am I to judge another's pain, another's journey along the road to emunah? I myself am frightened, stupidly so, of losing myself in that absolute trust of God, that faith that can move mountains. I am nothing, though. I'm old enough now to know that. Nothing without a purpose, without a beloved, nothing without my Source and End, the Alpha and Omega. What happens when a human being fully unites with the power, the love, that keeps the stars alight and aligned, that gives me every breath? We will become Christ, in a sense, and He will work His power through us at the level of emunah we surrender to. We in Christ, bring Christ in. 

As Rabbi Fohrman says about his own journey, "It is a test we must not fail." 

However, if the story of the Jews is a story of failure, again and again, diaspora and slavery, a story repeated, well-known to each honest heart, then how do we succeed? This is why Christ is necessary. He is the Expression of God; God is love, and sometimes divine charity can seem, as CS Lewis said, almost like anger because of its intense desire for the good of the other: an uncompromising desire for the highest good for each person. The Expression of this Charity was to "empty Himself of divinity, becoming like us in all things, even to the lowest point, to death on the Cross." This reminds me of the best fairy tales, the ones about the King who loves the maiden enough to seek her in the darkest places, to gather her like a crushed flower in His great, scarred hands and heal her. This is the deepest empathy: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," followed by the power to take up life again, because He is Life, He always has been. And this is the journey we must all take, as all mystics know, because their hearts search the depths and, I hope, find Christ though they may not know His name; and so, I will give the Sufi mystic poet Lal Shabaz Qalander the last word in hope that he too found, at the end of emunah, Christ—and loved Him: The journey is a test of faith / A challenge to the heart and soul, / A journey of surrender and grace, / A journey to the beloved’s goal.

*Image: Mount Nebo, where Moses looked out upon the Promised Land