Death Throes

Something in me is dying; is it some essential part, or a persona that needs to be shed? Am I,whole, entire, in some kind of death throe? I cannot tell if it is a death of hope, or a death of that part of me sold into slavery to the opinions of others, to success, to being seen. It feels the same: so I wake in the night, most nights, in some kind of labor, in panic; I have seen the death process, and sometimes it is a long one, the body fighting tooth and nail, without reason, to keep the organism alive--whether the soul is on board or not--to the point that I've seen non-fatal doses of morphine sometimes given 'to knock back' the fury of the body, the panicked attempts to protect important organs, to let the soul decide. A difficult, fine line, which I don't quite understand.

For ten years now, I have watched my body going through this process in a milder way--I have been on the fringes, the edges, of that most intense process I have seen others go through in hospitals and nursing homes and bedrooms. I think, actually, for us all this process goes on over a lifetime, as George Herbert describes in his poem "Mortification": "the swaddling clothes the winding sheet"; "the music of youth the death knell." Sometimes, when we fight long-term illness, in my case, the vacuously-named 'dysbiosis.' it is a parable for the same needed in the soul, a harbinger of the Lord, a preparation, as it has been, I think, in my case.

Does the soul, like the body, resist death without distinguishing a necessary death from a harmful one? How does one distinguish the death of self from the death of hope, especially when one is selfish? Wouldn't the death of self feel like death of all that one has placed value upon, all things that made one happy, what one looked forward to? For one like myself who has always struggled particularly with easy discouragement and resulting depression, how do I know the difference?

I'm beginning to wonder if, in the state I'm in, the habit of self-absorption, I can only sit in the dark and trust God. Inside myself, I see a light over a dark hill which is the boundary of the dark valley I live in now; I sense, rather than see, some path I must walk in order to get to that light--it is a path of death, or rather, perhaps, a turning, a deeper repentance that feels, to my selfish heart like death, in which I begin to walk after St. Francis in spirit, after those who were given the grace to actually die to self. To me it is too big; I have always lived in fear of losing out. I've been attached to so much under the guise of not being attached to much; it isn't about something I'm supposed to do in the eyes of anybody outside myself. I can sense a deep choice the Lord is laying out in front of me, but just like bodily death, everything around me, inside of me, is scrambling to hold onto what I know--my doubts, my anger, my fears, my grievances, my smaller loves, especially that of how I am seen. I am in a limbo of irreconcilable things, like the cruelty and abandonment I experience and see in the world with God's love and providence.

What is the choice? I can't frame it well, for it is in a much more subtle language than any human language. It is a hand held out, someone waiting for an answer, a kind of surrender, a change of focus, a change of treasure--a sparkling one for a lump in the dark--a step in the dark, leading to an Other with whom I have wrestled, been angry at, and have loved all my life, best expressed in Herbert's poem, "The Pearl." It is, simply, a transfer of love--from the self to the Lord, who is difficult for me to love, because He has a different love language from mine. He doesn't hug me or often tell me what to do; I often feel abandoned. But it is because I must change my language, and learn His? Or will He teach me His? Perhaps it is that: a willingness to be taught, to listen anew, while yet still in the dark. I can't express it well.

I want to run, and jump, and say, 'Yes!" but my soul is still strangled by itself, still in the death throes most often in the hours of the night while I lay looking at the spider webs beside the ceiling beams, and I know these throes can go on for eternity, because the soul is eternal. I am in that valley, weighted down, shackled, and I have the key--or God is trying to open my hand so that He can use it. My heart is broken, my spirit crushed, my body likewise broken and crushed daily. Deep inside, the child that I am longs to simply run to Him, to find Him, but the adulteration has all the weight of an ocean of water, filling that dark valley, drowning my soul. I can only cry out to God. And so I do. I do.

Touching the Corpse

                        


In today's reading from Luke 7, Jesus is traveling near the spot where Elijah raised a widow's son from death, and he  comes across another widow following her son to his burial; at first glance, it is a familiar human sight: the heads down, the wailing, the dark clothing of the mourners shuffling slowly behind the bier burdened by a white-shrouded lump, inert, helpless, a shell, a nothing, lifeless. Jesus sees the situation, and identifies with her: a lad has died, her lad, and besides, she has no one to care for her. He says, first, "Do not weep," then walks up to the bier and touches the corpse; as he does so, everyone comes to a halt.

This moment is deeply profound, and this profundity is reflected in the fact that all the people stop--perhaps everything suddenly goes still, a collective breath is held. Why? Jesus has crossed a major line, and we can look at this using St. Augustine's four levels of interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Literally, everyone must stop for him as he touches the bier; he has halted the procession. Allegorically, he has stopped the procession to death, the inexorable movement to the return to dust; allegorically, also, he has stepped into the shoes and life of the widow and her community, and has identified himself with the corpse, with death, by touching it. On the third level, the moral, Jesus has also made himself impure by identifying thus with the dead lad and his community, all of whom were now impure because of having a corpse in their midst. Anagogically, meaning the spiritual or apocalyptic (revealing the truth of God), Jesus identifies himself with a humanity bound to death, under the law of death--even the young.

Jewish ritual laws around impurity and purity have that profound, beautiful, pregnant revelation common in Abrahamic and Mosaic culture and law, down to the richly-laden Object-Sign reality of each letter in their alphabet; Jewish concepts, and most viscerally, perhaps, the rituals of impurity and purity, have the ability to carry consciously all four levels at once. The concepts of tumah (impurity) and taharah (purity) were at Jesus' time, and are, for strictly Orthodox Jews, expressed in literal actions (touching impure things like corpses, menstruation, releasing semen, childbirth, eating the wrong foods or the right foods, washing in special pools like the Pool of Siloam, or temple rituals like that of the red heifer for severe uncleanliness--like that contracted from touching a corpse). Physical, human, literal activities were expressions, or signs, of a common-life, symbolic, moral and cosmic reality, a reality that we can analyze into four levels but which in reality is one, a wholeness, one reality. There was no secular and sacred for the Jews: there was life and death and all of it was God speaking to them, all of it was about reaffirming and praising the Source of Life. There is a deep truth to this, because even though one can separately analyze the four levels of interpretation, in reality they are all connected intimately with each other: we know the allegorical through the literal--the literal things around us have obvious comparisions and connections with both other literal things, both physical and non-physical realities, like the death of an animal is comparable, relatable to a human death, yet not the same, and the death of a living, physical being is analagous to the death of a bond or a covenant; the allegorical naturally, logically points to moral content, because comparison is an assertion about reality which is ordered, and we are inherently moral beings, and the creation, the cosmos, is imbued with order, and order always implies right and wrong; the order of something always points to a final cause, and there is a right or wrong-ness, on more or less serious levels, of course, about whether or not the final cause is fulfilled and whether or not it should be. There is always an ought associated with order. The moral level also naturally points to a deeper, more cosmic reality of our relationship with the Creator of order Himself, the anagogical. So, in reality, though in modern Western culture we talk about 'literal' and 'allegorical' and 'moral' and 'spiritual' (anagogical) as separate spheres--after all, we moderns live astride two profoundly separated paradigms: the secular and the sacred, and the sacred diminished and split from even the literal, from 'reality,' to the point that we can no longer sit astride them but they instead fracture us--yet, though we talk about it and even experience these as separate, they are not. Therefore, the Jewish purity laws remind us that our modern fracturing is not reality, or at least is only a 'saving of the appearances' or the model we chose to adopt somewhere in the late Medieval period with nominalism. The saving grace in Western culture comes through the Sacraments of the Church, the fulfillment of the Jewish laws, most especially in respect to God-laden signs, signs which really participate in God, and allow us to participate in Him--the source and summit of all of this the Eucharist. Like their fulfilments (the Sacraments), the Jewish purity laws are an experience of a wholistic mindset in which literal activities, even common daily activities and events, are a kind of participation through the will, through praise and affirmation of God as Creator, as Source of Life, not source of death.

More explanation is needed: I take some of this from a beautifully-written article from a Jewish scholar, Lauren Berkun, entitled "Life, Death, and Impurity," from other encyclopedic sources on the Jewish concepts of impurity and purity, and from Martin Buber, the great phenomenologist.

First, as Berkun relates, it may seem arbitrary and even misogynist to demand that a woman who has just given birth be separated from the community for a time and then go through a ritual cleansing, and that the time to purify is twice as long for a baby girl as it is for a baby boy. Is this about the relative goodness or badness of gender? Berkun says no. She says that it is connected to all of the other ritual purity laws, in that all of them are about re-affirming and praising life. The collection of these laws in themselves have a single meaning, a single source. So, menstruation is a sign that there is no pregnancy, or there is a loss of pregnancy, a loss of life. This is a deep affirmation of the good of human life in the womb. The spilling of semen is also, in a sense, a loss of potential life: Oman's deliberate spilling of his semen so as not to impregnate Tamar is doubly impure, and sinful, because he is not only deliberately wasting his semen for selfish reasons, but he is also deliberately preventing life in Tamar's womb. He is on the side of sterility, 'lacking life' and so is on the side of 'absence of life.' It is not the same as willing an already-living being to die, but it is still a lack of affirming life.

This is a literal act, or occurrence as in the case of menstruation, that holds within it a final Object. That final Object, through literal action, allegorical understanding, moral affirmation, and finally, participation in praise, is God as Source of Life. In the case of childbirth, the woman is no longer doubly full of life, but is bereft of that blessed state, a woman who has the deep capacity to be herself a vessel, a living affirmation of God's giving of life, a giving of His own image once again. She is bereft of that state after childbirth, and so there is a sense of impurity--she is not as affirming of life in her body as she once was; a baby girl is a double impurity because the woman has been bereft of another woman, another potential ark of new life. This makes sense with biology, too, in that a baby girl has all her potential eggs, potential life, from the time she is a fetus in her own mother's womb: allegorically and literally, she is an almost endlessly potential chain of new life, new images of God. Therefore, the time of purification for a baby girl is twice as intense.

This throws a whole new world of light on these purification laws, ubiquitous in Jesus' time. Touching a corpse, like menstruation, like childbirth, like emitting semen without directly willing absence of life, was not actively sinful: these occurrences were part of daily life, and people, in a sense, were subject to them...one was trying to affirm the Source of Life in a world often imbued with death and reminders of death. The ritual cleansing (a red heifer ceremony for the presence of a corpse in one's home and community) was a way to re-affirm one's commitment and praise of life; it was, also, deeply, a way to deal with death psychologically and emotionally. Human beings have always needed rituals not only to comfort, but to re-establish order in the face of the faceless, the nothingness, the dissolution of death. This need, though, is more than a pacifier; being so universal in human culture, it points to deeper realities about life and death, about the need to affirm life and the need to reject or recognize the disorder that is death. Anyone who has been around death knows instinctively that it is a scandal, a blot, for a human soul a disorder. It should not be. Therefore, when one is associated with it, one has associated with something cosmically impure, disordered.

Therefore, we replay the scene on the dirt road to the tomb (etymologically related to the Jewish word for impurity, tumah). Wailing. Huddled, shuffling. One woman near collapse with grief and the double curse of death and immanent poverty and helplessness, an endless closing down of life, of the future, maybe years of it. The bier carried in double-grief; the death of a loved lad, the duty which means one, for a time, must affirm death and therefore must be impure, separated from the Source of Life until the cleansing can take place. One must live in Death's Camp for a time, along with the corpse. One must be a corpse. A crowd of corpses.

Jesus, a Rabbi with many followers, a teacher of the Torah, is expected to not even look, or to turn away, as the fictional Pharisee turned away from the mugged man on the road whom the Pharisee was afraid might be a corpse. Instead, Jesus looks; more than that, he identifies in the heart: "He had compassion." Not only does he identify in the heart, he acts upon this in a literal way and places his hand on the bier, on the corpse.

Of course they all stop. This is unprecedented. One might think that this is a Rabbi actually choosing to affirm death, not life. Why does Jesus do this? No other Rabbi would, not necessarily out of selfishness, but not to give the wrong teaching, the wrong affirmation. Another Rabbi would affirm the ritual law because he wanted to affirm life, not death. Death was not to be seen, to be acknowledged, except by those to whom it had been given to deal with for a short time. This could shed light on Jesus' affirmation of the faith and charity of the Centurion, who does not wish Jesus to risk many levels of impurity by entering the house of a goyim and one with the shadow of death hanging over it, and who yet knows Jesus has the power to heal without risking impurity. This shows the level of concern around these laws.

No other Rabbi would touch the corpse.

Perhaps we can change this a little? What if we say, "No other Rabbi could." No other Rabbi could both touch the corpse and affirm life; no other could identify with death and bring life. Only, perhaps, a prophet, which is why this event being so near where Elijah raised the widows son centuries before is symbolically important. There was  precedent--one given the power of God, and only one given the power of God, the Source of Life, could bring life out of death, could bring being out of nothing, out of dissolution, out of absence. Jesus is therefore taking an enormous rhetorical risk--what was He communicating? What was He affirming? Would they understand? The nearness to Elijah's raising of the widow's son would bring to their minds the nearness of the power of God, a reminder that God is not far away, not an absentee Father, not a Source only in terms of time-bound generation. It would remind them of God's dynamic, present, relationship. God had listened to the prayers of Elijah and had worked through him to bring life out of death, to conquer death, which is a more powerful, intense, affirmation of life, an affirmation beyond human power.

It is what the man born blind says to the Sanhedrin when they question him about Jesus' healing of his eyes: blindness was a lack, a constant affirmation of disorder and, in a lesser sense, death. The blind man was a walking disorder and this, like death, was a reflection ultimately of death and disorder coming from sin, the sin of Adam and Eve. The blind man therefore says, "None but one with the power of God could have made my eyes to see again."  The blind man is reiterating the principle that if God is the Source of Life, the only Source, then only He can give life to something that is dead, from one's body to one's eyes or one's hand. Therefore, the blind man's argument is irrefutable by those--all Jews--who claim, intellectually at least, the premise that God is the Source of Life.

Jesus touches the corpse in the middle of the walking dead, the impure, and in their eyes, is either choosing impurity and death, or is at the least filled with the power of God, like Elijah. Of course they stop and wait. Jesus says, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sits up, and begins to speak. And he gives him to his mother. Fear seizes them all, and they glorify God, saying, "A great prophet has arisen among us!" and "God has visited His people!"

Indeed: God has come again, the Creator has come again and created, or re-created. Out of death, from death, the Creation happens anew, and life is never more firmly affirmed that when drawn from its opposite in the direct, personal, particular scene, the direct, personal power of the Source of Life, in a small town among those who are dead, are poor, are nothing. As Mary, Jesus' mother sings, "His mercy is on those who fear him: throughout all generations. He has shown strength with his arm: he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek."

The Source of Life is not distant, like Aristotle's Prime Mover, or a Deist god; mirrored in the Jewish conception of language and action, with all meaning truly, really, presently imbued in the simplest, daily things, God is present, and very near, as He was through the prayers and work of Elijah.

But in this second incident in the same area, in this raising a dead son, is there someone greater than Elijah present? Did the crowd differentiate Jesus from Elijah? It seems not; they dare no other language, or concept, perhaps, beyond "prophet"--one through whom God works and reaffirms life, one whose whole life is a living sacrament of the Lord. No small thing, to be sure.

What would it take to see Jesus as He claimed to be? Not a prophet, not a purely human instrument, but someone much more than that...in other places, people comment on the way Jesus exhibits the power of the Source of Life, of God. They say things like, "He speaks with such authority." Elijah is taking orders; he is praying, and asking, as Jesus does as well, but Elijah follows instructions; through this obedience to God's directions Elijah is able to be used as a tool in the hands of God.

Surpassing this,we see Jesus, in this scene and in many places in Scripture, acting and speaking with authority, and acting from his own inner desire, a place of mercy and compassion. He says, "Do not weep." He gives the orders: "Arise." He gives the son back to the mother. He is both obedient Son and God; he asks the Father, and prays often, but knows also that God always hears him. He acts with an authority beyond one who acts based on instructions or visions given him; He acts with the Father, in a union of love. Jesus' attitude and actions make most sense if one posits a fully human and fully Divine, a union.

And then, sometime after, he becomes the son on the bier after a horrifying death, the death of a criminal; he is followed to the tomb, becomes tumah, and he is followed there by his mother, a widow. He literally dies. He has already told his followers that he will die, and will "raise this temple."

Dies.And rises. The Source of Life has lived among us, and has, through death, conquered not only physical death, literally, but on all the levels--death as the death of all, death as sin, death as cosmic disorder--and so the way back to Life, to the Source, are opened. The law is fulfilled. The signs now must reflect this cosmic healing, this absolute affirmation of life. Our daily lives must reflect, sacramentally, the way the Jewish laws did, the reality, the revelation of God. Thus the Sacraments are both descendents and fulfillments of those laws.

What does this say about the idea of perfection? Although the making of Himself a corpse, identifying, in a sense, with a most imperfect thing, a corpse lapsing out of the integrity and wholeness of life into the dissolution that is death, was perhaps one of the deeper signs of His compassion and the lengths he would go, Jesus seems almost constantly to teach the lesson of identification with death, with imperfection. Why? This apparently goes against the logic of the Law, against worldly logic around the identification of life, perfection, goodness, success, 'the righteous.' The clarity and affirmation of perfection found in the laws of the Torah, in their directness, cannot seem to account for one claiming both identification with God (the source of perfection, of life) and who, in action and even words, seems to identify with the dissolute, the sinner, the dissolution of death.

This walking enigma from Galilee, of all places, was not the affirmation of the Law that was expected: a straightforward blast of power into the Law the way it had been applied to life in Israel at the time Jesus enters the scene as a teacher. The application of the Law had been highly logical, and was a bulwark against the cultural and religious disorder that surrounded them in the pagan world; to be the Chosen and to be Separate and to be Holy seemed unequivocal terms. Do they not seem so to us, as well? Don't we also see perfection as a living being unmixed with mistakes, with error, a machine with all the parts in perfectly working order, an aesthetic symmetry whose form most clearly and easily and directly reaches the end for which it was made? Was not the Law, and its many and complete applications to every action the only way to imitate the perfection of God, to be His Chosen, His signs in the world of what the world had lost, a way one could return from the exile that was Babylon, the sign of the world? Was not sin "missing the mark" the mark being the perfection that is God?

In the Old Testament, there are two basic root words indicating perfection: taman, which denotes a wholeness, completeness in terms of justice, integrity, ethical perfection; the other is calal, which denotes a completeness and perfection more in the sense of beauty, comeliness, that which would draw one to itself out of desire, an aesthetic perfection. Though through those who saw Jesus, and through the lives of the saints in the millenia following Jesus' sojourn through this world as a man, we do get a sense of the Beauty of God to the point of it being, in the case of the Father, an overpowering experience (to Moses' request to see God's face, God replies, "You cannot see my Face and live"), the Suffering Servant verses in Isaiah seem to point to taman (ethical perfection) as the primary perfection Jesus meant to teach when he came as a man:

And he shall grow up as a tender plant before him, and as a root out of a thirsty ground: there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him: Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity: and his look was as it were hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed him not (Isaiah 53).

In God, the Trinity, the perfection of Beauty (the sight and experience of Order), Goodness (the living reality of Order as it creates), and Truth (the existence and being of Order) are all One, yet we humans, like Moses, cannot receive it all at once in this world, in a world of time and the learning, wherein  radical free will is somehow essential to our willing and loving, of choosing God. We live, rather, in a kind of mess that we must sift through with marred, diintegrated beings--the flesh fighting against the spirit, the flesh doomed to dissolution. We are in this world under the power of Death. Just as a corpse cannot comprehend or respond to the living spirit any longer, so our wills deadened and dissolute through our participation (a participation by generation) in original sin, we cannot on our own choose God.

The Greeks understood this, and expressed it in their profound tragedies, like Oedipus Rex and The Trojan Women, and many others. They had a sense of perfection, either in the Source, the Prime Mover, the One, the perfection most closely aligned with the dance of the planets: unchanging, pure, simple, end and form and material all aligned with the efficient, the power that set them in motion. Herein was Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. But on this planet of shadows and imperfect choices and movements, a world of conflict and impurity, a mass of competing wills for scarce goods, there was no perfection. Aware also of the inexorable passage of time, the Greeks conceived of a world which was moving away, in generational steps, from Perfection, and that there was no return; one might as well wish for the water to return to the spring. Destined, fated, to be along the imperfection chain which stretched endlessly away from the Perfect Origin, the world was, in the sense of absence of perfection, evil. Therefore, human achievement was best expressed through an enduring and a learning of one's place through suffering. There was no redemption or return: there was learning, there were hints of a kind of holiness and grandeur in one's suffering, as we see in the mysterious Oedipus at Colonnus, but was there true redemption?

How many of us feel this way, especially those who struggle with perfectionism? How many of us fixate on the mistakes we have made, or on the fact that we see our bodies fall away from perfection as we age, or for how many of us is there an innate repulsion from anything that is not whole, sound, comely, desirable? How many have worshiped another and wished that what they experienced was finally this perfection, only to abandon that person when the flaws become, inevitably, apparent?

Was there a way back to the Origin? To perfection? Socrates is one of the first major hopes for this in the Greek world: through the discovery of Truth, through a search for the Whole, we could achieve wisdom (the apprehension of the Wholeness, the Oneness of Beauty, Truth , and Goodness): the human mind was able to apprehend this, through only in stages and through hard labor; Socrates hints at a kind of afterlife and potential for blessedness, but he was not himself able to redeem others. Was he preaching a way back to the Origin, the "sun" of Plato's cave? His teaching is a mystery, and he is almost unique in his time; he was popular with those who preferred to find success and power in the mess of conflicting wills, those who felt it foolish or even blasphemous to attempt to apprehend Perfection.

But the way back had already begun among the Jews. God called Abraham out of the world, much as He had called Noah, and began to open the long road: was it 'back' or 'forward'?  God uses the language of generation with Abraham, but not as a movement away from Himself, but as a promise: "Your descendants shall be as the stars in the sky." This was an affirmation of life from a Creator. The major difference is that this God was transcendent, beyond, a Father of the whole thing, not simply a source within a system, beholden to that system for his being. In the Greek, non-transcendent worldview, how could re-generation, or a truly new generation, happen? In Tolkien's allegorical representation of a Creation, not supplementation, myth, the Creator can even take a marred note in his perfect symphony and create new variations, a new symphony that begins anew, that enriches; a Creator can go beyond a simple return to the Garden, but can enlarge, create a going forward to a Garden of Gardens, as Peter Liethart says in Deep Comedy.

The difference between an Origin within the Cosmos and a transcendent Creator? One has an inexorable part to play, and there can be no true personal connection with that which flows away from it, as the beginning of the equation cannot jump to the middle of it and relate to it in any rational way. But a Creator is not only the Source, but the Father, separate from His Child; He can love all his children, and He can re-create them, renew them, for He is Lord of all, an artist of a living artifact.

So God, because He is the Creator, is Being itself, is the fullness of perfection in both senses--taman (wholeness, completeness, the integrity of justice), and calal (wholeness, completeness, as apprehended in symmetry). The Jews, through the Law, were attempting to imitate God in this integrity and were taught that this integrity must reach to every part of life: to be integrally ethical, one must be perfect, in the wholeness of one's life.  The Jews were imitating, or attempting to imitate, the perfection of God, which for a Creator, also means that one is imitating the affirmation of life.

But what of the weakness and lack of perfection endemic to human life? What about those who mess up? When Jesus speaks about "coming not for the righteous but for the sinner" he uses medical language, a physician healing not the well, but the sick; we must put this in context with his admonition that "only God is good." Therefore, who are the well? Who are the righteous? Is there any human who follows the Law to perfection, both outside in action and word, and inside, through thought and motivation?

That is a rhetorical question. Yet, in Matthew, Jesus calls us "to be perfect as your Father in  heaven is perfect." He seems here to be very Jewish; in fact, His call "to clean the inside of the cup so that the outside may also be clean" far outstrips the demands made even by the Law, and leads us to ask along with the disciples who are responding to a like demand for integrity, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus answers, "With men, it is impossible; with God, all things are possible." Here, again, Jesus is pointing to a Creator. A Creator! God transcends and can destroy death and evil, because He can fill those absences of disorder and dissolution again with order and life.

Yet Jesus did not come as One who would attract the worldly, those searching for the perfection of beauty as found in this world, or through the messy machinations of this world. He also did not come to affirm the idea that by following the Law on one's own that one could achieve perfection. He came and did that Himself, but He did not preach self-sufficiency, because this could not work. God Himself must be part of any perfcetion; He is not a legal contract, or impersonal state. To counteract this, and to show that the Law pointed to a deep reality, a relationship, He came as a Sign of Opposition to these false understanding of perfections. In fact, He goes so far as to identify Himself with the deepest weakness of failure, sorrow, suffering, dissolution; not only did He touch a corpse, but He allowed Himself to become one through the death of a criminal, a blasphemer, the bane of both Roman and Jewish orders.

Why? Is the way forward somehow through death? How can death serve and affirm life? It is a paradox, a crossing of the wires, that either demands rejection or a search into its mystery. It is either foolishness or a deeper-than-human wisdom that still scandalizes us. God-as-man? A particular man? Creator-as-creature? Life dying? No, in human terms, it does not make sense; more than that, to those who wish to affirm life through the Law, it is blasphemy of the worst kind: a subversion of the order that is the way forward to the blessing of God, a turning back from the promises of Abraham and Moses.

Isaiah 53 again alludes to a mystery identical with Jesus' claims about Himself and His actions and His mysterious identity not only with imperfect humanity but also with death itself:

Surely he hath borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows: and we have thought him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.

He was taken away from distress, and from judgment: who shall declare his generation? because he is cut off out of the land of the living: for the wickedness of my people have I struck him.

Herein is the mystery of the scapegoat and the lamb slain as restitution, as a sign of redemption: "The goat can 'take on' or 'be identified' with your sin, so that the dissolution and disorder as consequence can be averted." There must be restitution, or payment; there must be a means to re-order or the sense of order, order will be lost. We matter that much, we humans. The Jewish legal sign of sacrifice to re-achieve perfection was only a sign; an animal could only analogously take on sin and disorder: the whole, real weight of it would require the Scapegoat who could simultaneously re-create, who could by His suffering, redeem and re-order the cosmos: this is an act only permissible, only effective, by the Creator Himself, for only He had power enough to take it all on, and only He had the power to take up life again and therefore conquer death itself: it was again an act of Creation ex nihilo.

Isaiah 53 continues:

Because his soul hath laboured, he shall see and be filled: by his knowledge shall this my just servant justify many, and he shall bear their iniquities.

Therefore will I distribute to him very many, and he shall divide the spoils of the strong, because he hath delivered his soul unto death, and was reputed with the wicked: and he hath borne the sins of many, and hath prayed for the transgressors.

 The book of Hebrews takes this one step further: "By one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy." Not only has Christ walked forward through death to reclaim life, He has opened also this way forward for the imperfect human beings He asks to love Him. Therefore, perfection is found in 2 Corinthians: "My grace is sufficient for you, because my power is made perfect in weakness." 

The mystery of the God-man who touches a corpse begins to reveal itself a little: A Creator who identifies with His creation so much as to be able to take even disorder on and re-create it, can therefore truly redeem it, can re-affirm life in a much, much more profound way than any law-following or imitation: the Pharisees were face-to-face with the real power of God, and they could not recognize that this power was made a redeeming power through identification, through the dive into emptiness in order to fill it, like one who befriends disorder in order to love it and make the desert bloom again. 

But this power goes on, for there is a reality beyond time; Christ the Redeemer, He who touches a corpse and brings it life again, can fill and water the empty places, the imperfections, the disorder, in our lives. Thus, our weaknesses become opportunities for Him to teach and reach the world again and again. Does this mean we try to be imperfect so as to leave room for Christ? No, because love is willing the good; Christ never said "Fair is foul and foul is fair" or conflated absolutely the essence of perfection with imperfection; it is just that there is some deep and profound good when a creature, bumbling through the disorder and injustice of this world, willingly turns to his or her Creator and desires, beyond all ego-desires for self-sufficient perfection, the holiness that comes rather from God, the love and perfection that is God. This choosing is all. It means we have a participation, a relationship of love--a love chosen in the face of great obstacles and suffering, in the face of being forgiven of much--comprised of of the greatest love, a love beyond our capability: and the joy of recognizing who God really is, partly through knowing that we are not Him. 

My imperfection is God's perfection, if I love Him and let Him work and re-affirm my life, which may be as of yet more corpse-like than I realize. Cut off from Him by my ego and self-sufficiency, I recognize these places of death and He comes to touch them, to take them on Himself, to identify Himself with them, to become the water that allows itself to become one with the dry ground and make it fruitful again. 

Love. 

A Mantle of Folly

"Mantle of Folly" is a phrase taken from an essay I read this morning: well, rather, it was part of one of those multi-serendipitous moments when the Lord is speaking something in layers--just to make sure one gets it. Sometimes He speaks over months, little droplets of meaning, and in a moment, a little torrent of drops that surprise, as when, after a rain, the wind plays with a tree and a small shower falls, seemingly out of nowhere. So this essay was part of a longer conversation.

A few months ago, I was still and quiet, looking out my window at the light falling through the trees, and I suddenly had a vision shown me; it wasn't a dream, or even a picture eclipsing the physical world around me; it was if my soul was directed elsewhere to see something. I was led into a very dark, gloomy room, as if in direct contrast to all the glorious physical light around me. It seemed a place bereft, and I could make out figures in the gloom, people in capes and hoods barely discernible from the surrounding darkness; I could see well enough, as I adjusted, to discern that their heads were bent over, each in his or her own area, as artists bent over some difficult and important part of their work. I could feel the concentration. At first I was frightened and thought I was staring at some coven; I recoiled a slight bit, and, as if my slight movement drew the attention of the figures, they all looked up and towards me in one movement, the way students in a classroom taking a test will all look up at the noisy entrance of a clueless stranger. As their faces became visible, it was like the rising of a golden moon on a warm summer night; their faces were glowing; their look was full of something--something beautiful.

I pondered. The word that kept coming to me was, "These are my hidden servants in the world." I didn't understand why I saw this, why it was given to me. I have learned (a little) to wait on the Lord, as He reveals Himself and what He wants of us in His own time, a time perfectly attuned not only to our person, but to the state of our character at the moment. I am often fearful and I need to ponder things slowly, and so He gives me little drops that gather until I am ready for His wind to shake the tree.

One of my besetting sins is an anxiety about not accomplishing enough; when I was young, it manifested itself as deep anger and frustration and envy: why wasn't I born this or that way? I felt helpless to accomplish anything great, though I felt called to it. Instead, I am largely, in the measure of the world, a failure, especially when I compare my potential and the gifts I was given. I am beginning to understand that my major failure has been a failure of humility, a lack of seeing, a blindness to how the Lord is and works. I have always been trying to fit Him to my expectations for myself. I was and am also highly sensitive; an old friend once said, "I don't think people like you belong in a world like this; you're too fragile." I knew that I was created in delicate, Venetian glass, but that I wanted to hold strength and greatness in this easily broken vessel.  Thus part of the frustration. How can a small glass bottle be great?

My greatest gift, I've known for years, is to see and to listen and to counsel. How can one remain sensitive in a world like this? How can one remain sensitive in one's own soul full of chiaroscuro love and selfish violence? The greatest battlefield is my own soul, because I am Achilles and Penelope in one soul. I looked at this pitiful situation and I pondered failure and success, and Adrian Van Kaam's insights about "the vocation of failure" and St. Francis' desire to be "le jongeleur de Dieu," all of these ideas and images that have spoken to me over the years. St. Francis used his gifts for the glory of God, not men, and this is both the greatest fulfillment the human person can find and it scandalizes and annoys the world, flies against any ideas of dignity, success, or power. Christ was the model for St. Francis, and He also flew in the face of expectations of success.

Why? There is something about the work of God in this world that often defies human expectations. I am still trying to understand. As I continued to ponder, I began to look for those people in my vision: who were they? They would be hard to see at first, cloaked, their faces obscured in the darkness of this world; they would be concentrating, perhaps on something that could not be seen because of the gloom. I began to see the people in my life who fit this, whose success lay under a mantle of folly. Titles or not, education or not (sometimes especially those without, though this in itself is not enough), they quietly work for the Lord laden with littleness, even failure, in the eyes of the world. I visited one of these cloaked ones this summer: He and his wife, without anything beyond a high school education, have a glowing remnant of Eden in the mountains of Washington; when I woke up that first morning in their small farmhouse, I went outside and the grandeur of their surroundings matched the humble beauty and light of their garden, orchard, pastures, sheep, the photos of their ten children and twenty-one grandchildren, and a deep and humble wisdom imbued the house, the animals, and the land around them. This man also is the closest image of Socrates I know, and is the most educated man I know. He has worked for many years to help young people learn how to think, to find truth, and to love: he can do this because he knows how to think and to love. He has the clear sight of those who live, spiritually, in the mountains. Though every college and university should be clamouring to have him, none would give him a a look; due to his lack of formal education, he is not seen, and wears a mantle of folly in the eyes of the world. But if one looks into his soul, he glows like a golden moon.

I heard a second word; it was about being one of these cloaked figures, and it was about letting those whom God sends me to come, so that I might share in His healing of them. I don't know what this means exactly, but it feels like jumping in a river to my timid soul.

This morning, a little wind shook the tree and a torrent came. I found the story of Elijah going up in a chariot, and how, in the days before his departure, he tries to shake off his student Elisha; Elijah at first keeps telling Elisha to stay and that he, Elijah will go to the Jordan or to Jericho; each time, Elisha counters that he will stay and travel with Elijah. Prophets in these places seem to taunt Elisha; perhaps they are showing that human concern--knowing groups of experts as I do, I tend to think it a display of knowledge at the expense of the pitiful apprentice who is about to lose his master. This thought is confirmed for me when Elisha asks Elijah for "a double portion" of Elijah's spirit when he goes: Elisha will need it as his own small spirit is not enough to handle the mantle of being Elijah's successor. Elisha does indeed receive this double portion as Elijah departs, as he, given Elijah's cloak, uses it as did his master to part the waters of the Jordan. I have always loved Elijah and would want to follow him as Elisha does--he is a father to me. I love his explanation of the "small wind" and his sensitive spirit called to face the gloom of this world, coupled with his courage and absolute trust in the Lord to do what He says He will do.

I was curious about this passage on Elisha, though, and I found an essay, the essay from which I take the title of this blog. By James C. Howell, it is entitled "Mordor: 2 Kings 2: 1-12" and the author muses about whether Elijah is trying to spare Elisha by trying to shake him off before his departure. Woven into this is the somewhat analogous story (did Tolkien have Elijah and Elisha in mind) of Frodo and Sam's journey into Mordor, especially when Frodo tries to shake off Sam at the river across which Mordor lies: "Go back, Sam. I'm going to Mordor alone!" Sam responds: "Of course you are, and I'm going with you." Sam runs into the river not knowing how to swim and Frodo finally, won over, fishes him out and they go on together. What Sam and Frodo are doing seems like pure folly, and their cloaks of Lorien are humble, nondescript grey, but powerful veils against the eyes of the Enemy. To do their great task, Frodo and Sam must be cloaked, not only in literal cloaks, but cloaked by their littleness. The Enemy only looks for the assault of the great, not the little; a worshiper of power, he and his forces understand only power. The writer of the essay also includes the seeming folly of Gandalf to leave "the affairs of Middle Earth to the diminutive, fun-loving, timid Hobbits." Gandalf answers, "Despair, or folly? It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy."

Like Gandalf, and Sam, and Frodo, and even Aragorn, Elisha was clinging to someone, to the Lord and to his master, a servant of the Lord whose life was a poem of folly in the eyes of the magicians and powerful of the world they lived in as evidenced by the challenges they threw at him. The world clings to false hopes, to the hope of worldly honor and success and power, things those who believe in the survival of the fittest and the smartest believe to be the measure of being immortalized. Elisha, facing the taunts or the concern of those groups of prophets, asks for a double portion of Elijah's spirit and gets it; he puts on Elijah's mantle, his cloak, and walks on the hard road of being one of God's workers in the gloom. Frodo and Sam wear their grey cloaks and pass unseen through the gloom of the great.

Are we all called to be the hidden ones in the gloom? I don't know. Some seem to be called to more public positions, like Fulton Sheen or GK Chesterton; others are called, like St. Francis, to wear a colorful cloak of folly, a jester's cloak; others work more quietly, artists in their workshops. All, though, are called to humility, to work within God's will, to be His hands and feet and heart and voice in the gloom. Woe to those who try to have both worldly success and God as separate goals: success in one area, and God in another. The one will eat them alive and betray, the other will be shut out. Only one can be the master of one's soul.

I think the Hidden Ones are living a vocation. I think St. Therese speaks about it in her Little Way, and in their ways, many saints speak of it. There are religious orders with many Hidden Ones; what perhaps has not been as clearly seen, or perhaps it is for this age, is that even more hidden, perhaps, are those whose work in the world truly unknown, unnoticed, except by those with eyes to see. Do I have this vocation? Can I accept it if I do? Can I do it well, with my tendency to retreat and be frustrated, and my love for being 'onstage'? I think it is more about those who sow seeds; many sow seeds who do not get to reap. It looks, in a way, through human eyes, like a failure, or a wasted life. But God does not squander the gifts of His children; He did not let his own sowing, his Hidden life, to be squandered. But it was, in His lifetime as a man on earth, a seeming failure, a tiny mustard seed that later became a mustard tree for the birds to rest within.

The Mark of a Great Life

The mark of a truly great life is a great love.

So, the romances are right, after all? What a relief to a soul like mine, worn out from the workaday world, from the waning of life's romance in the wake of bills, car repairs: I suppose I fit the remark of CS Lewis via Digory in The Magician's Nephew, "All the adults cared about was the plumbing." Now, Digory, to be fair, someone's got to take care of the plumbing--but, yes, total focus on it can and does sometimes rob life of the beautiful colors and smells and sights and touch of the magical world seen best by children and saints like Francesco of Assisi. Over the years, because of my growing cynicism I'd got to the point where I'd buy cheap romance novels to give as prank gifts: the best one I found, by the way, as a going-away gift, was Wicked Wyoming Nights.

However, I am gifted by God with children brought up in Wonderful Wyoming Days, for the most part. They, like many in their generation, fell in love as young hearts with the magic of Tolkien's sub-creation and the ready parallels to this they found in the panorama of rivers flanked by enormous, red canyon walls and sage brush reaching out a hundred miles towards snow-capped sentinels saluting an unbroken, blue sky sometimes populated with cloud castles, ever-changing decor in the powerful, unmediated light of the high desert. They saw, and loved, the possibility for discovery, for adventure, the sheer grandeur and mystery of the world around them, down to whatever was around the corner from our house; they waited for the first snow to fall and ran out in it; they waited for our annual Christmas Eve feast as if it were a heavenly banquet, and for the 4th of July in Lander as if it were the trumpets sounding the Return of the King. They were naturally drawn to beauty, and they loved it in its many forms. They loved in the most basic way; they desired unity and unending discovery of something beyond themselves. As they grew, as children do, they struggled in puberty with the many changes, the least of which is the physical change into an adult body; the major, most profound change was in the eyes of the soul, a soul that learns and develops through poetic images, images of beauty, most profoundly---and this change is the most painful.

I am not sure, quite, what happens, but it is as if the rose-colored glasses are washed away by the hormone-shifting, and the romance, the magic, the open door in every tree leading to the Hundred Acre Wood all disappear and are often replaced by the sight and desire for a human, physical love. In one sense, this is a step up to the first rung of the Ladder of Love described in Plato's Symposium. The Ladder starts, as Socrates explains it, with the love of a particular beautiful body; then, as all beautiful bodies share in 'beauty' as a quality, the lover begins to realize his love for this universal quality of beauty; next, as St. Ignatius Loyola realized when he saw the decaying corpse of the queen he'd idealized for her beauty, the lover begins to understand that the soul-qualities that are the formation, a cause of the physical, the moral and spiritual beauties of the soul, are higher 'participations in' or manifestations of beauty; then, beautiful laws and institutions created by beautiful souls are higher because more universal; then, the next, higher rung is the beauty of knowledge (philosophy) because for Plato this is the soul of beautiful laws and institutions; finally, philosophy, or the love of wisdom, leads directly to a sight of that unmediated light, the Form of Beauty itself, that for the sake of which all else beautiful is, the source of all beauty.

Therefore, considering love as a desire for Beauty, smaller and greater loves are defined by their end-object; is it true that what we love, what we see as Beautiful defines us, forms us, reveals us? As my children grew up, like Digory did, I watched them struggle with the loss of that great vision, those special glasses through which they caught a glimpse of Beauty, a Beauty above their understanding and beyond them. They had to begin, in a sense, at the bottom, with the hormones raging and the new desires for particular beautiful bodies distracting them. Yet, though there was and is some sadness and loss in it, they must climb the ladder which is the journey of the embodied soul and deal with the romances of teenager, the lessons and disappointments, the joys and the temptations. The world tells them, in most 'romances' (not necessarily on a certain spectrum with Wicked Wyoming Nights) that they should stop here, on the first couple of rungs, that a great personal romance is the top of the Ladder, that another person can encompass all the rungs of the Ladder: the body, the soul, the institution (as a couple, a family), as knowledge, as Beauty itself. In a sense, there is truth to this: a human person has a certain participation in Beauty itself because he or she is made in the image of God, of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness personified. Yet, yet, there is a problem with this. Anyone who has stayed married long enough knows that another human person cannot, does not, fully embody Beauty, because Beauty is, as Socrates states, more universal and cannot be encompassed by any particular creature. Beauty, for Socrates, is a source, a cause, a telos (that for the sake of which). It informs all below it, it is the source of all that participates in it; without sight of this source, or desire for it, one can easily mistake the rung for the whole ladder, including what is beyond it, and in doing so, miss that for which our hearts are truly restless, as St. Augustine teaches. Not only this, but there are counterfeits of Beauty parallel to every rung: by mistaking or choosing the counterfeit instead of the real thing, we begin to climb down a parallel, but descending ladder: a beautiful particular thing can be simply a satisfaction of lust, and there are never enough of them; the satisfaction found in many particular things leads us to amass them and try to possess them; the very nobility of our own soul and the souls around us can be used to serve our own lusts; institutions and communities are desired not for the beauty in them, but for what they can give our ego and our will; philosophy becomes sophistry in service of our own status, and Beauty becomes nothing more than the Self. In view of these dangers, it is by our very real and our poetic experiences of the failures of particular creatures, jobs, institutions, communities, things, specializations, accomplishments to satisfy that longing, that searching so obvious to the child's soul before beginning the arduous climb up the Ladder, that we must make choices about the object of our love, our deepest longings, that desire which defines us and determines who we will become.

Encountering the lives of others, like poetic images, is one way we learn what to choose: recently, I've 'met' three people who all bear the mark of a 'great' or 'enormously powerful' desire. Two of them were a married couple, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator couple executed, in horrific poetic justice of a sort, on Christmas Day in 1989. Born in real poverty, his childhood romance with life marred and warped perhaps in part by a drunken, cheat of a father, Nicolae left home at ten years old and eventually found community in the Communist Party. "Why should those pigs have great houses while everyone else starves?" he was once heard to ask by a fellow inmate when in prison for Communist activities in pre-Communist Romania; the only particular person he seemed to love as a young man was his wife, Elena, who seemed over time to encompass everything in his life; in turn, she seemed to love power and control most of all: He and she and power seemed to form a kind of counterfeit Ladder. There is a news film of Elena seated next to Chairman Mao's wife on that fateful trip to China in 1971, which seems like a poisoned watershed moment in their lives, and the subsequent life of their nation. Next to the powerful wife of Mao, perhaps comparing herself to the other woman who seemed farther along the ladder to ultimate satisfaction, Elena's dark eyes stare, the pupils spreading across the irises like ink spilling, the soul spilling out in desire to grasp the world. She took power for herself after she saw what the Maos had accomplished in terms of control, and became the force in Romania behind the 'management of the masses.' Her husband seems more fearful and human than she does; her desire, her 'love' seems more 'pure' in a sense. They become unabashed egoists, the love of power an undisguised love of themselves, and of course, like so many who appear 'to love' the masses, or the workers, or humanity, traitors to their own espoused philosophy. They are eidelon, or false images; they are nothing, but it is the nothingness of a black hole, gaping ever wider, sucking the lives of others to maintain itself, sucking Beauty out of the world for everyone around. Even when counterfeit, aimed at the Self, human love in its most pure state has a greatness, a power to it, albeit the nuclear power only to destroy that very self. Thus, as the adult (Professor) Digory says later: it is all in Plato...the unjust, no matter how pure or 'great' their desires, in the end have no power, because they destroy themselves; they cannot fulfill the end for which they seek, because the self is not the source of life, or beauty, or power, and the real telos and therefore happiness for the human soul is found in giving oneself to Another, as love can only survive and grow when poured out in the service of others. The self or another egoist as source leads to an ever-gaping hole, a perfect negative image to the real source of life and love, which is at the top of the Ladder, the real Ladder.

The third person I have met recently is a young man, Carlos Acutis; born in 1991, he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2006 at fifteen years old from a rare, fast-moving form of leukemia. Already with a sizable following in his own country, he was declared "Venerable" by the Catholic Church in 2018. His life, like Elena Ceaușescu's, is marked by a great and pure desire. In his childhood, he somehow encountered Christ, most profoundly in the Eucharist at his First Communion just at the age of reason. He fell in love with a particular body, in a sense, but this Body was also Beauty Himself; this encounter was the nexus, the meeting place of the first, lowest rung of the Ladder and what is beyond it: in his child's soul, there seemed to be no doubt, perhaps because he still had that vision of the child, and it came together with Christ in a tangible, particular way, a way that Carlos could grasp, a grasp of all the levels of the Ladder at once. His actions, his life, his decisions were all guided by, sourced in, that great meeting of universal and particular Beauty that is the God-Man in the Eucharist. When you see films of Carlos, or photographs, he has a similar focused look to Elena, a deep and pure desire; the gestures and body stances may all seem similar: an open-armed stance toward the world, a certain authority. However, Elena is a dark, negative image of Carlos: something about Carlos is truly receptive of Another, of a Love which truly serves; Carlos seems to become part of any scene he is in, truly with anyone with whom he is photographed. His desire spills outward, like a spring, as if there is a great aquifer in his heart that by nature flows outward; Elena's desire draws everything inward to her, like a predator who looks intensely to see what it can consume next. Carlos draws in only to point to something, Someone, beyond himself, a Source beyond, above, up the Ladder. In his short life, Carlos seemed to give to the world, not take from it. He seemed to be aware of the Ladder we must all climb, for he practiced great self-control around desires, knew that the nature of Beauty, of Love, is to serve and to spend itself for others rather than the self, and spent his energies and talents drawing attention to the Eucharist, to Christ, to Beauty, which was his greatest desire, his goal, his telos. On his coffin is an engraving of the Eucharist in a monstrance, surrounded by the words, "La mia autostrada per il cielo," which in true teenage fashion, means "My highway to heaven." On this highway, or ladder, in his great love of the Beauty beyond his life, he became beautiful: and he is marked also by greatness, a greatness that, like that of his mentor St. Francis of Assisi (Carlos is buried there), will grow. True greatness, then, is the soul's participation in the Greatness, the Humble Love, of God.

Carlos particularly shows, as well, that indeed we receive this great love, we do not manufacture it, because this great love implanted itself in him as a little boy, a boy in a more nominally Catholic family. He did not come from great trauma or suffering; he was a happy, normal child, not particularly deserving of any such great gift; thus he shows us that we are simply not the source of this Love, this Person. It is a gift. Carlos was given a tremendous gift of faith and sight in childhood that informed and weathered the storms of early adolescence, and he seems to have ascended the Ladder at lightning speed, like a bottle rocket. The key is that he received this great love, responded to it with generosity, caught sight of Beauty Itself, and allowed it to imbue all the descending participations in Beauty, and that Beauty through him poured out to his community, the Church, particular souls, and all around him. Two months before his death, before they knew he had any issues at all (his leukemia was sudden and fast-moving), he is filmed saying, "My destiny is to die" and he smiles and claps his hands, and looks away with a certain intensity of peace. Elena, on the other hand, never accepted death or recognized it as a possibility, it seems, even as she shouts for them to not to hurt her hands as she is led out for execution. But somehow a fifteen-year-old Italian teenager knew that even death becomes beautiful in the life of a truly great person marked by a great love, the greatest of all loves: Romance returns, and we become childlike again, but in love with the Real Thing, not stopping at the things and fellow-creatures participating in it. In receiving this love, often shown us through suffering the losses that teach us to look beyond for Beauty, we go beyond human childhood and reach spiritual childhood, and in doing so, we transcend ourselves. We learn, finally, only to love creatures in relation to and because of, for the sake of, Christ, Beauty and Wisdom personified. And this is justice, and power, and order. This is greatness.

And so this young man who could be my son has become my elder brother, a model, a poetic image of what it means to be born again, to become again as a child and so to enter the Kingdom of God.

Tea with Bill D., or Thoughts on Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep

Bill D. came and had tea with me...and a bunch of other people, mainly students from the school where I teach History, English, and Rhetoric; based on his essay published in 2008 on the failures of elite education and his subsequent book Excellent Sheep: , William Deresiewicz , or "Bill D.," shares a commitment with our community: to return to education for its own sake, to eschew--at least for the undergraduate--the ultilitarian ends of a college education in favor of a true search for meaning, for the self, for truth, a return to the "liberal arts" tradition which, he says, teaches students how to think, how to speak, and teaches them about building the self. He has some beautiful, wonderful quotes in his book about the irreducible complexity of the world, the self, and that to reduce oneself and one's education to a utility is tragic.

With a gentle, friendly, intense look straight into my look, he shook my hand, and I liked him immediately; I felt that I could have many cups of tea with Bill D. and that the time would fly away and leave us in a long, delightful present of open conversation. As he began to speak, this impression was confirmed. He was apt to answer a question from a student with another question--in fact, a series of questions--in the way I imagine Socrates might ask--not as weapons but honestly looking for the filling of ignorance. He asked, "Why do you want to be a nurse? Have you had any experience?" And then he would listen carefully and respond with an honest assessment, but always with the caveat, "I don't want to presume, though--maybe I'm not understanding you?" This was a man willing to dialogue, even debate, but not the kind of debate that runs on disconnected factoids like little flaming arrows, or rhetorically powerful enthymemes like Greek fire erupting impossibly out of the water; he is open to other arguments, seems to desire genuine understanding, yet is honest about conclusions of which he feels certain.

Yet, in some ways, as a classical educator, I am almost diametrically opposed to Bill D.'s most basic premises, and to his definition of the liberal arts--more particularly "art." We live in a world Joseph Pieper predicted in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, a world in which simple, settled terms morph and become, simply not what they were, become more or less weaponized. When a word like "truth" becomes "subjective feeling," all of a sudden, centuries of culture and depth around a word, the meaning built with extreme care by the likes of Socrates and Aristotle, confirmed and embodied by Christ, and built upon by Aquinas, the meaning behind this little collection of symbols, the Object to the sign-word, becomes an inverse to the original. It becomes a weapon stolen from the hands of those who understood it, and used against them, against the young minds that Bill D. obviously, genuinely cares about. He is, in my view, a kind of tragic irony that only the modern world could produce.

In Chapter 8 of Excellent Sheep, Bill defines the liberal arts first as an education which is about forming the student, which I agree with; then, he began to define, implicitly, "art" in the modern sense of the word--literature, perhaps visual art, like painting or sculpture. This was the first clue that Bill D. and I were not speaking, in a sense, the same language in terms of the classical, liberal arts. He then seems to define the liberal arts as "humanities" like English and History classes, or works of literature, fiction, or perhaps poetry; none of it was very precise, but I caught the load of cultural 'common' assumptions--I got the feeling from the chapter that he simply expected me "to get it." But I have lived too long between the pages of Aristotle and Plato, with Aquinas and Augustine, and later liberal arts experts like Sr. Miriam and Fr. Ashley to accept the wide brush strokes Bill D. uses to define "liberal arts." Furthermore, the pages of this book seemed to cloud over and take on an ominous feel. I felt I was dealing with a nuclear submarine instead of the natural, familiar creature I was expecting.

My mind immediately went to Aristotle's Rhetoric, because in it he speaks very clearly to an "art" in practice, and how it is intricately related to knowledge of truth gained through rigorous argument. He calls "art" techne, from which we get the word "technology." But this techne is not just about tools; it is an activity, a craft and the crafted, art and artefact. "Art" in the sense of 'craft' is a transitive activity, in that it has an objective, an end; material, power, and form come together through art to produce something. In the art of rhetoric, one is producing a kind of seeing in the audience members, a vision, an image in the mind and soul which disposes the audience member to choose in a certain way. For instance, deliberative rhetoric is the art of persuading a person to either do something or to avoid doing something; for the Greeks, this is the art of politics, which, however, in a certain respect, Socrates found dangerous to the soul;  through this caution, suspicion of rhetoric, Plato's Socrates delineates 'art' for us well in the dialogue Gorgias; he uses elegant proportional ratios, analogies, to indicate the true "art" of the politician: "as health is to the body, so justice is to the soul" and the the one who is practicing the "art" of helping the body reach its true end, health, is the artist, the physician, who has the epistome, or knowledge, of the body; likewise, the one, the metaphysician, the philosopher king, who has true knowledge of the nature of the soul can effect justice therein. In this brilliant stroke, Socrates shows simultaneously that art has an end in relation to natures, and it is founded on real knowledge--as an art, Socrates is suspicious of rhetoric as it is so easily abused if not having a "subject"--he keeps asking Gorgias, the famous rhetorician of his day, 'What is the subject of this art?" or, in other words, what body of knowledge is this art based upon? Aristotle seems to correct this lack of understanding in the aforementioned Rhetoric when he says, "Rhetoric is the counterpart [antistrophe] to dialectic." Here, he is using the language of Greek drama when he defines rhetoric as the symmetrical 'answer' or 'response' to dialectic, much the way the 'antistrophe' choral part in the drama is a refrain or response to the strophe. When I explain the relationship of rhetoric to dialectic, I ask students to imagine a line of masked, robed figures slowly, majestically dancing out from one side of the skene, chanting, and then another line emerging from the opposite side of the skene to sing their antistrophe. This is a powerful image Aristotle uses to describe the "same yet different" relationship between these two arts, dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic is, for the Greeks, logic in the sense of discovery and testing of arguments through conversation; it is the discovery of truth in accordance with the Good, the universal principles upon which the world, material and immaterial, is formed--this is the prior art, then, to rhetoric, and only rhetoric founded upon the rigors of knowledge gained through dialectic is worthy, or good, and truly persuasive: Aristotle claims that the human mind can know essences, and can recognize Truth; in fact, Truth, what is reasonable and in accordance with the real, is the most deeply attractive to us, and a knowledge, for Aristotle, more real than the experimental demonstrations we can do in the changing particulars of a material world, or mutable matter.

Fundamentally, Aristotle takes as a self-evident principle that our minds can, in some mysterious sense, have a certain unity with the kosmos, the ordered world, that we can know essences of the things around us, and that through reason, we can ascertain relationships and make true propositions about the material world, order itself, principles derived from experience of the particular, and even a higher order of thought and reason that can grasp the fundamental laws not only of the the physical world, but of morality, virtue, and the Good. In fact, Aristotle reasons through stages and orders of being, natures, right from prime matter to the Prime Mover (who is beyond the physical and is the root of all metaphysics, and in a supplemental way, physical order).

The liberal arts, as a species of techne, are the arts that are "intransitive"--the purpose, or end of these arts is the formation of the reason, the soul, the training and expanding of the faculties particularly human that allow us to see the whole and the part, and to understand the relation between the two. Through the arts of logic, rhetoric, grammar, some pure mathematics, and poetry (which in the classical tradition includes music, drama, story, poems, dance), a human person is developed to his or her highest potential.

Bill D., especially in Chapter 8, however, seemed to have a very different definition of art, though he seems to adopt the idea that it is, somehow about 'self-building'--'liberal art'  seems to be, for him, an impression, or highly subjective conjecture, a bit the way I imagine some guy in 70s clothes having an "ah" moment in front of some Warhol piece in the MOMA. I like Warhol, actually, but I don't think seeing something about myself in giant Coke cans, or even more seriously in an Austen novel (a writer which Bill D. and I both adore), is the real deal about art, and certainly not the huge dustbin of "ah" self-realizations that Bill D. seems to think indicates the liberal arts. For him, the arts seem confused with a modern, narrow notion of poetics, though logic, dialectic, etc seem to be included in a confused way but not with any indication about what they are for beyond 'learning how to think. ' As this particular chapter progressed, the arts changed from 'thinking' to an equation with 'Humanities.' I ended up confused.

I therefore came to the tea very interested to see what he said about all this; as I listened to him, and partook in this invigorating conversation with this interlocutor who was willing to bare his thoughts to ours, and to receive and ponder ours in turn, I began to discern the structure of thought that created the scaffolding for the rhetoric of Excellent Sheep. He spoke passionately about thinking for oneself, and choosing education for self-formation, I wondered if he would begin to expound for them the beautiful organization that is the Trivium (logic/dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar) and the Quadrivium, and the Sciences upon which we use the faculties developed in the Trivium and Quadrivium. I wondered if he would explain how we can call "Metaphysics" a science because it is an enquiry into the deepest truths of the kosmos--in other words, that the whole education is for the purpose of freeing the person to find universal and material truths. However, when challenged by some young minds and hearts about seeing "truth" in the poetic images of literature and other 'arts' (in the modern sense of that word), he said clearly, 'Well, now you are making me think about this--I haven't thought of this that clearly, but I would say that, no, there's no objective, universal truth to be found in the arts." He continued, "I do think there is objective truth to be found in the sciences--empirical truth we find through science; but no, morals are culturally relative--even relative to the individual. I mean, think about it--when you read a book and then read it again ten years later, the "truths" you find in it change." A student then asked, "So the only objective knowledge we have is through material science, like modern biology?"

"Yes. There are "truths" you see in terms of recognizing something analogically about your own experience, your own life, but I do not believe in The Truth. I was religious as a child, and 'The Truth' was given to me through dogma. I don't see truth in that anymore, and I don't think there is universal truth about anything other than material science."

Pondering and picturing, mapping his premises backwards from these statements, I began to see the world the way he saw it, which seems to me to be quintessentially modern, a la Kant, or rather, Hume, the empiricist. Bill D. is a modern materialist, locked inside his own mind except for the moments when he can conclude with someone about the reaction of germs after 1000 experiments have been done, with multi-permutations of variable scenarios and control subjects. The 'truths' he enjoins young people to search for via the 'liberal arts' are simply self-actualization tools, and no more than that. They are again nothing but utilitarian because they have no higher end than toothpicks in a toothpick castle that becomes the 'authentic self.' C.S. Lewis had a name for these selves: Men Without Chests, people without anchor to anything solid, the abolishing of the human soul as having an end, a place, responsibility, purpose. If there is no possible connection to Truth, or anything transcendental forming and united with a rational, purposeful kosmos, then the human person is no more than self-conscious grass withering with the first onslaught of heat.

His arguments about cultural norms or evidence of natural law are the typical "he said, she said" tropes. Yes, I cannot empirically, scientifically demonstrate the moral order, because this order is not of the same kind of being as material experimentation; therefore, if one only accepts a narrow view of epistemology, then one effectively ostracizes any other form of knowing. It is like a child claiming that only the things he sees at the moment, in his vision, are real, and nothing else is. One looking at something else cannot argue with the child, because the rules have been set against his seeing anything else. It becomes a self-fulfilling reality, a self-justified inner circle.

 I cannot therefore prove to him, or hope to have true dialectic about the moral law, the soul, even thoughts, because he lives in another universe, a Cartesian, Kantian, Humian one; yet he cannot prove to me through his own form of empirical, materialist model that thoughts, moral laws, universal principles, the soul, justice do not exist. In fact, a la Occam's Razor, the simplest answer built on our self-evident, collective experience, is that they do, in fact, exist.

In his world, he can define the liberal arts as he sees fit, because in the end, definitions don't really matter, just like the Christian, Aristotelian principles Jane Austen builds her novels upon, principles she saw as True, universals found through the particulars of her own time and place, particulars that repeated, like the antistrophe, the strophe of Truth about virtue and human nature, can now, for Bill D., become "ah" moments of "truths" he discovers about himself that will, and can change, as he does. He and I can't even share Austen in any way that matters.

Therefore, his "liberal arts" are dilettante-ish virtual realities that aid us in "self-creation," not the arts that are intransitive and yet allow us to ascend the ladder of Beauty, Truth, Goodness towards that moment when we, with Augustine can say, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

I would still like to have more tea with Bill D., though, because I think he can dialogue without recourse to "discomfort" or "offense."

Origin(s)

I can't show you the Creation, those kairos not chronos "molecules" of the Presence and Fathering of God through the Son, the dance of the Holy Spirit on the face of the deep; you can't show me the moment when a chance variation was burped out of other chance existences: we are both left looking at a mystery, a spiraling beyond, behind, effectively infinite.

So what?

Well, it matters, doesn't it? I mean, in all forms of human understanding--not data accumulation, but understanding--the truth of Origin matters; more than that, the Origin drives, grounds, completes any system of thought, any belief system. So where are we if we cannot understand the Origin of that worldview we hold? How do we understand Euclid without knowing that "the point is that which has no part"? How do we account for all if we limit ourselves to our own mind, or to a model? What is the hope of finding truth without sure knowledge of it? It seems to me that all understanding of Origin demands faith and inquiry simultaneously. Simplicus, writing in the 6th century AD a commentary on Aristotle's Physics, summarizes Anaximander, one of the "Presocratics":

Of those who say that [the first principle] is one and moving and indefinite, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian who became successor and pupil to Thales, said that the indefinite (to apeiron) is both principle (archē) and element (stoicheion) of the things that are, and he was the first to introduce this name of the principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other indefinite (apeiron) nature, from which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them; and those things, from which there is coming-to-be for the things that are, are also those into which is their passing-away, in accordance with what must be. For they give penalty (dikê) and recompense to one another for their injustice (adikia) in accordance with the ordering of time—speaking of them in rather poetical terms. It is clear that having seen the change of the four elements into each other, he did not think it fit to make some one of these underlying subject, but something else, apart from these. (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24, lines 13ff. = 12A9 and B1)

Anaximander and the other Presocratics like Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and others would not have considered science as distinct from philosophy and theology; in fact, philosophy, or "love of wisdom" would have been the activity, a desiring of truth; in reading the almost mystical love-poems to God or the gods of some Prescratics interspersed with logical deductions about fire and water, one begins to understand how the desire for understanding is truly personal, a longing, an adoration. And these lover-thinkers, writing about a thousand years before Simplicus was building a bridge between them and the sharp and clear focus of Aristotle on the Prime Mover, focused upon origin. Was it one of the four elements, or an archē (principle) and stoicheion (element) that has a nature and indicates thus a kosmos, an ordered creation, with laws and purpose that allows for a criteria for all things: natural laws, moral laws, a justice that is based not on human will or the super-wills, the will to power of Hesiod's Theogony, but rather flowing from this "must be," this Esse?

In the foundations of Western thought, here between the philosophers and the poets, one sees three streams begin to develop: the inquiry into order, the indwelling of personified forces, and the unity of both. The Presocratics are astounding because they see Origin as fundamentally ordered, discernable, and yet also mystical and poetic. Xenophanes says: “And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature cloud / purple, red, and greeny yellow to behold.” He references the poetic and does not parse the cloud into separate drops. Socrates and Plato follow this unified inquiry and indwelling via the Socratic method of defining, questioning, and the doctrine of recollection, a kind of indwelling of the Forms; Hesiod and Homer are not scientific in any way but are those possessed by nature as super-persons, willing servants of the Muses; conversely, Aristotle begins, in a sense, the almost total focus on logical inquiry, and though he unites the physical and meta-physical realities into one great pyramid resulting in a Prime Mover as Origin and End, he seems to turn away from the poetic as anything more than "medicine" for the emotional pressures of the human polity, writing treatises and manuals, not mystical works (see the more medical language of the Poetics).

The search for Origin becomes thus less unified, the different foci (on inquiry or on mystical indwelling) becoming potentially different towers of worldviews built on different methodological foundations. I find these different foci somehow connected to the difference between the view of time, of the present, as kairos and sequential, as chronos. Kairos means, literally, "opportune" or "critical" moment; the best illustrations are the humble ones--kairos is that moment when Odysseus could most effectively and beautifully string and bend back his great bow, arrow poised perfectly, to shoot through the axes; kairos is the moment when Penelope's weaving shuttle can move through the loom-threads most beautifully. It is, in a sense the best activity at the present moment; the fullness of time. It also has a sense of the indwelling of the gods, the 'propitious' moment, the moment when all forces come together to produce something. Yet, if one observes Socrates, each moment has its kairos: there is the moment, always, to stop for Beauty, and his apparent "lateness" in terms of chronos, or sequential, measured time to the feasts of the Gorgias and the Symposium, respectively, is a criticism not truly of Socrates but of the focus of those around him on purely human, rational matters. For Beauty there is no chronos, only kairos. For a more purely logical inquiry or scientific 'cause and effect,' methodology, the sequence is essential.

It seems to me that Origin lies also within kairos, and is prior in nature to chronos, the sequential, the measurable on a more subjective human scale. Thus, Origin is essentially mysterious, unknowable except perhaps by the mystic or the poet. However, is it then no longer inquiry? As science and religion and poetics slowly, over history, become strangers, separate disciplines (not even activities anymore, but mountains of data and theories), is Origin now archaic? Or do we amputate the hope of it altogether, living within scientific models like Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Copernicus as one might live inside a tent and look at the stars through a special window created for viewing?

Can we have truth without being able to demonstrate through a microscope or an extrapolated theory that seems grounded in available rock samples?

As I live more on the front lines of the secular world, I see more clearly the sharp divide, and the impossibility of dialogue without knowledge of Origin--for even the more radically scientific, not poetic, Aristotle helped us to see that origin is also end, in the sense that it is the sense of everything that flows from it, and so creates the purpose via the creation of order. Aristotle's Prime Mover is removed, in a sense, from the world that flows from it, but the world is a child of that One, and only fulfills itself in the sense that it fulfills the order set in motion by the Prime Mover. Therefore, in Aristotle I also find kairos, though in a less poetic or mystical way; perhaps he does have a kind of synthesis, and this makes him a kind of bridge between the threads of pure rational inquiry (science) and the ecstatic, poetic, mystical, recollected sense of the whole in the kairos.

I believe, with Socrates, and later Christian thinkers that Origin, the true Origin of all we know, of reality, is eternal kairos, meta-chronos; it is the moment of indwelling, the propitious present out of which everything else flows, takes meaning. If we cannot know it, or have hope of finding it, we are lost in a deep cave, in the dark. We can, of course, do experiments on the rocks, observe the hints in the darkness, and if our inquiries are not infected with the desire for personal gain, we can see glimpses of That for the sake of Which all else is, the Source.  The inquiry for the human person is the activity, reason working in accordance with reality, that is one side of knowing, of wisdom. But in order to know the whole--or to have a 'worldview'--one must see the Wholeness in some respect, first. And we are meant to see the Whole, made to see it, which is what sets us apart from other levels of being. Inquiry is the struggle to get out of the cave and to see, eventually, the sun itself, symbolic in Plato's Cave as the Truth, the Origin, the Beauty: Truth itself as One, as Origin and End. Yet the turn from the things we see by the light of the Sun and seeing the Sun itself, Truth itself, is like a turn from chronos to the eternal kairos, outside of, beyond chronos, and only one who participates in this eternal present, as Augustine describes it in the latter half of the Confessions, can truly have hope of a coherent and truthful worldview.

How do we then speak to each other across disciplines and cultures and 'views' if any hope of knowing the Origin is gone? How, if we are no longer working with models but rather are locked inside them? Or, after Kant, and Hume, and Descartes, we cannot even truly be outside our own minds?

Much of our world now has lost the ability to see beyond self--my ideas, my preference, my reality--and so my only hope as a teacher is to do what Socrates attempts with the proto--Nietzsche Callicles: to try to reach a young, more flexible person through the love found in questioning. And to model the search myself, as I am searching, in love and trembling, to find the Origin. Teaching is not rhetoric primarily, but a combination of many things--first, it is a realization that one is an image to a student, easily confused with the images on the wall of Plato's Cave. One does not want to become another image for a young soul to mistake for the arduous journey; thus, if one's students become addicted to the you as teacher, it means you have become too important, and the search for Truth, for Origin, will die with you, or as soon as the student is old enough and wise enough to see that you, also, struggle often in the dark.

The best metaphor for teaching is a mixed one--sorry--first, that of educare, or "leading out," and second, a kind of midwifery. How do these go together? As Socrates states in the Cave metaphor, only one who has gone on the search out of the Cave can truly lead, for as Aquinas and even Chaucer (through the mini-polis of the pilgrimage under Harry Bailey) relate, a leader cannot lead if he does not know the purpose for the human person, the telos for both the human person and for human community. A leader must have a sense of the Truth, the End. In Aquinas, this is why the state and Church must cooperate; in Chaucer, this is the clue to the failure of the pilgrimage. Harry Bailey from the first mistakes the telos of the pilgrimage itself; in fact, he goes farther and introduces a contrary end: that of pleasure in the place of penance. He cannot lead, because he cannot see Origin and End. Therefore, he cannot "lead out" and order the stories, nor can he help the pilgrims "birth" stories that will further the pilgrims toward the true end of the road; instead, disorder and division and sin are introduced almost from the end of the first tale. Perhaps it is no mistake that Chaucer never finished the Pilgrimage; perhaps as it was set up, it could have no good end, but must be re-founded.

Like any good leader, then, a teacher is not focused solely on persuasion (too tempting to self-aggrandizement and narrowing both logic and poetics to dispose towards certain judgments decided upon first by the teacher--not true inquiry, which is dialectical, not rhetorical) but rather on giving the human person the situation and tools to begin to search: for if humans are truly made by and for Origin and End, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, then as fire desires "up" and earth "down," we will naturally, with our particular human faculties, desire Origin, the fullness of Truth: and we will find ecstasy, eternal happiness, in beholding this, because it is Beautiful. And the most important truth is that the human person, in order to find, must also search, for as love is a movement towards what is True, Good, and Beautiful, so the rational struggle and search is the natural precursor, the disposition to the poetic, the mystical, the receptive. We are rational animals, not plants, capable of relationship and love on a cosmic scale. Thus, teachers work to develop reason, and like a father putting his son on his shoulders to see the view, as leaders and midwives we offer instances and images and orderings and inquiries that are themselves indwellings, the kairoi.

We then get out of the way and this, for a teacher, is the propitious moment, the moment when the student is able to bend back that Odyssean bow, or send the shuttle like a bird in flight through the loom-threads, and we shoot and weave and search alongside: this is the kairos of teaching, when God imbues the art with His love and power, and can begin to indwell, calling us both, student and teacher, to the sight of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: the Origin.