I.Job

I, Job, sat in my filth, but I knew there must be more:

the rotting flesh and the sickly warm stench,

the dead beasts, the burned children,

the earth-swallowed crops.

The three made sucking sounds when they saw me:

their despair groomed and inexorable,

formed into petrified thoughts--

finally they left me among my wreckages.

I, creature, I, Job, heard the sound first, my eyes buried in my lap:

drops of stinging water hit next; out of the straining air

I heard the roaring of the Other, the Over-all-others.

I curled up, a wounded animal.

Images from the Voice filled my mind:

the great Leviathan, tamed, the great seas, untamed,

and the tiniest quark, the humble foundation required

for the making of a leaf.

I, nothing, I, Job, lifted my head and threw it back:

the wind lashed my cheeks, burned my eyes;

I sent my hands out, opened my chest to the Voice;
the Whirlwind came to whisper— 

Epictetus

Philosopher in rough goat’s wool,
staff shining and smooth,
on that rock, alongside the dusty path

leading along the bleached cliffs,

the olive-leaf compost under your bare feet,

disciples poised around, 

faces shadowed by swaying branches and, in turn,

enlightened in the dancing light of sun and sea;

they meditate, catching your wind-flowing words.

One, "pro-hai-re-sis," slips away, beyond.

The bodies of you, philosopher, and your disciples

become olive dust or heavy rain, or stars, wind-lost,

but now I whisper "pro-hai-re-sis" 

and you live, again, philosopher.

The One, True Imaginative Vision

               

Deuteronomy 20:  Moses gives instruction to the nation of the Israelites toward the end of their long sojourn in the wilderness; an enormous crowd of men is given the law of God regulating the process of warfare, the means for taking possession of the Promised Land. There are four specific instructions for individual soldiers; which one does not quite fit? 

Has anyone built a new house and not yet begun to live in it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else may begin to live in it. Has anyone planted a vineyard and not begun to enjoy it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else enjoy it.  Has anyone become pledged to a woman and not married her? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else marry her.” Then the officers shall add, “Is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too.

The last exemption is about a negative: fear. The first three, however, are different, and somewhat surprising. Isn't warfare about self-sacrifice, even in the face of these kinds of losses? Aren't the best soldiers the young men with 'nothing to lose' beyond their lives?  Studying with an insightful rabbi (Rabbi Fuhrman of Aleph Beta) can train one's mind to see the places in the Torah where there are rich layers of soil in the verses; often, these are noticeable by their surprising twists. 

Indeed, these three exemptions have rich soil for understanding God and His relationship with us, even if just a little bit more. More than this, however, is a fascinating connection with Luke 14:15-24, the Parable of the Great Banquet, which we will unpack downstream a bit. First is to understand the grounding in the Torah: the more studying one does, the more one realizes two things: just how often Our Lord references the Torah either explicitly or implicitly, and how He is teaching, on a deeper level, a message of transcendence, of theosis that was in the time of Jesus' sojourn on earth, and perhaps still is, not part of the Jewish imaginative vision. Thus, a vision of the Torah through the lens of the Good News of the Kingdom of God reveals a beautiful, holistic, imaginative vision, The Imaginative Vision that should ground and inform and correct all others. 

An imaginative vision, or a cultural paradigm, is explained well in From Christendom to Apostolic Mission; however, it is a common concept, something most people will recognize when articulated: an imaginative vision is a group grounding for action, a grounding most individuals in the group do not even "see" but rather see through in order to narrate their lives. It often becomes a settled, un-examined set of principles by which ethical character and action is judged; it gives meaning to life. When disordered, it can also become a source of tremendous disorder: it is the raw nerve that Socrates set on fire, when he sought to teach Athenians to live an "examined life." 

The three exemptions for the warfare that would result in possession of the Promised Land are signs of much greater Objects, these Objects being part of the God-given imaginative vision for human life, the one I believe Socrates was seeking when he sought the truth. As Rabbi Fuhrman explains, the first exemption is the new home; a man faces death, the end of all things for him, without the perfection (completion) of something basic to the meaning of his existence: a home. The same applies to the planting of the vineyard, and to the marrying of a wife. How are these eve-of-battle exemptions signs for the deeper imaginative vision of God? Rabbi Fuhrman, to explain this, turns to Genesis. God first built a home, the cosmos, for human beings; He then planted a garden and asked Adam to steward it, to tend it, along with a spouse, Eve; finally, God "walked in the garden in the cool of the day" and related to Adam and Eve in that garden, a kind of feasting and enjoyment together of the fruits of their collective labor. This, the rabbi states, gives meaning to the analogous human actions of building a home, planting a vineyard, and sharing the fruits of all this with a wife and the family flowering from the abundance. In these activities, we are, in J.R.R. Tolkien's phrasing, "sub-creators," in Rabbi Fuhrman's phrasing, "little creators," and the rabbi defines this ability as an acting out of the image of God in us. 

How are we different from animals, then? Don't beavers, for example, build homes, gather food, and share all with mate and offspring? The difference has to do with the human intellect, that faculty in us that sees beyond our smaller world of signs, the ability to see signs as signs pointing to a larger, greater imaginative vision, to abstract common experience beyond instinct and to find not only universal human meaning and joy, but to see analogously that God is communicating and relating to us in similar ways, that there is a perfection, a transcendence, a love beyond instinct and survival that our human activities participate in: to synthesize with a Platonic idea, this is the participation of lower realities in higher ones, creating a "ladder" of relation, such as the beautiful flower participating in the same concept of beauty as beautiful ideas, or moral beauty---just at lower and higher levels of transcendence, moving ever higher towards Beauty Himself---reminiscent of Jacob's ladder, in a sense. C.S. Lewis puts an even more layered spin on this in his essay, "Transposition," in which he explains that the higher can make sense of the lower participations, but the lower is always only a partial, imperfect articulation of the higher, and so very easy mistaken as an end in itself, because it is more directly experienced by those who live at that level, becoming a stunted imaginative vision, so to speak.

In giving humans the intellect with the potential to see and experience transcendent, higher, spiritual realities, God has imbued with supernatural, eternal love the making of a home, the planting of a garden, and the sharing of that; these signs also call us, as humans, to relate with Him, to desire a home with Him, to desire to work with Him to plant and reap, to relate to each other with Him at the subsequent wedding feast: such was the Temple, both the portable, wandering one and the permanent one, the one Jesus looked upon. All is pointing to being together with God. 

However, Rabbi Fuhrman does not go beyond the human imitation, imaging, of God; this seems to be the ultimate meaning of life for a human. Is there anything beyond, or are we stuck in the supplementation from the original? Is there any return, at least to Eden? 

Jesus' entry onto the Jewish scene, one heavy-laden with tradition, teaching, and layered symbolism, was a break-in. It is not surprising that He compares Himself to a thief in the night, or as the bridegroom showing up in the middle of the night: one unexpected, one who disrupts the prevalent imaginative vision hardened into an almost purely human-controlled system tightly wound by commentaries and a class system, a power-structure; He is the gadfly goading the desperation of an older vision, so minutely examined through the centuries that it could no longer be examined. The Jews at this time were occupied by Rome within their own Promised Land, even to the steps of the Temple itself. They were again on a war-footing, even if frustrated and castrated. They were waiting for a new Joshua, for the Messiah to come and clear their homes, their vineyards, so that they could properly find meaning in acting out the image of God within them. Had they lost the Imaginative Vision, or was it the time, the kairos, for the real Vision to be fulfilled? Were they a generation meant for the greatest of invitations?

God enters in and He speaks; in this particular mirroring of the eve-of-battle exemptions, He articulates the Parable of the Banquet. Luke 14:16-20:

A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests.  At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’

But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.’

Another said, ‘I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’

Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’

This is not exactly the same as the eve-of-battle exemptions, but the similarities are interesting. In each excuse, the invited guest is appealing to the activities that give rise to the meaning of human life, in imitation of God: acquisition of land perhaps for a home or garden, ploughing for planting, and the sharing of life with another. The difference is the end-point, that for which each wants an exemption: this is a banquet, not a battle. In one sense, then, there is no excuse for exempting oneself: there is no cause for being afraid for one's life or of dying before a perfection of human life; in fact, the invited are on the threshold of eternal life itself, the Imaginative Vision in actuality for each guest... and so the banquet has deeper meaning: as in the Garden of Eden, the true end of building and planting is not perishable, purely human, for human meaning finds its consummation through participation in the ultimate meaning: a spousal feast with God in His kingdom, in His home. The end point is no longer a perishable Promised Land gained by slaughter, but a Banquet with God: a return to the Origin, though the sacrifice of God's own life in the person of His Son. God takes on the battle Himself and provides the feast. All find exemption and invitation, but His own people cannot see Him or the reality He is offering, because they are bricked into their own paradigm, one which can no longer include the creativity, freshness, radicalness of the love of God, His desire to be with us, that desire that led Him to create us and to walk in the Garden "in the cool of the day," the time for communing and feasting.

So, at the time that Jesus told this parable, God's people had become so focused on their human activities that they no longer had the imaginative vision for the true end of human life: sharing in the feast with God. St. Paul, however, refers to those exceptions in the millennia of wanderers, prophets, and kings, leading up to Christ's realization of the promises: from Hebrews 11: 13-16:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

This city, this Promised Land, is what all those who love God long for, and in order to see it, we must always be ready, like the virgins with the lamps, for God to break in and re-adjust our imaginative visions, our unexamined assumptions, our paradigms, to align with who He is, the divine, eternal youth, the Bridegroom; He calls us to the eternal feast, one that transcends the poor and slow, perishing human imitations. Seek it.

The Star in the Storm

 

G.K. Chesterton once, now famously, saw a rhetorical question, "What's wrong with the world?" purported to have been in The Times, and answered it with a surprising twist: "Dear Sirs: I am." Today, in obscurity, I want to change that exchange, and imagine this: 

"What's right with the world?"

"I am." 

Now, I'm not advocating radical egoism; rather, I'm advocating an ideal, a hope, a reality in us that flashes off and on, like the star of the lighthouse amid the storms of the heart and the world. This trope, this lighthouse star is a way of life, a light in the world, a rightness in the world for wandering barques: I'm thinking of St. Therese of Liseux's "Little Way," the one Mother Theresa of Calcutta adapted for her own use, in a beautiful twist of fate: "Theresa" establishing the Missionaries of Charity following the spiritual path of "Therese" whose deepest desire was to be a missionary, but whose calling was a short, twenty-four year life in the Carmel desert. Their earthly paths, coinciding only spiritually and over a hundred-year span (they died almost exactly 100 years apart), nevertheless illuminate the working of God beyond our time-and-sense-bound apprehension. Both the Little Way and the way God uses these efforts, a dance between the willing self and God, can make me a "right," a small lighthouse star in this darkening world. 

For those who've not yet read St. Therese's Story of a Soul, the Little Way is one of the Saint's childlike conclusions about loving God and loving neighbor, "on which all the law and commandments hang"; in one part of her soul, she laments her inability to go out and do great things on the mission field, in the world who so needs the rightness, the cleanliness, the love, of God. In her time, she felt the weight of burgeoning atheism, just as Mother Theresa felt the weight of rabid secularism resulting in the economic and social injustice and inequality of her time; now, what is the weight we feel?

Many from all perspectives and faiths are beginning to come together in a chorus: disparate public voices in the US—from Naomi Wolf to Tucker Carlson—are beginning to call our present darkness "the face of evil"; many with the potential to be lighthouses in this world are beginning to see that, pervading all areas of life, which Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian military officer, experienced full-front in Rwanda: " I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him" (Shake Hands with the Devil). Anyone left with any courage or sanity after the last few years, or the will to see reality, is now faced in their own communities with the disintegration of the human species of law: social, health, civil, criminal, constitutional, moral. These are of course symbiotic forms; when one begins to go, the others will follow, as any saint like Therese or Theresa knows; what is now making it so painfully obvious to the rest of us who, albeit imperfectly, deep inside desire what is right, and good, and clean, sourced in love? 

Perhaps it is that which God wrote on the heart of every human being ever conceived, that which is the permanent lighthouse within us—that which tortures us when the wood and sails, and the captain of ourselves, are all warped—that which remains our mainstay and comfort in times of distress: the natural law. We are faced with that force which has lost its own face before God, that force of unadulterated solve et coagula, that spiritual version of the hopeless and pagan alchemic belief in the power to dissolve back in chaos in order to create, virtually ex nihilo, gold from base metal. None is a Creator like that beside God, and so it is a Satanic ape of the law from which natural law is necessarily derived: the eternal I AM. When we see people being pressured to harm themselves and especially their children, we naturally know this goes against our creaturely mandate to participate in life, in God's creativity: Abortion (recently described by one of our "lawgivers" as a "positive good"); harmful health mandates and "scientific consensus"-backed medical malfeasance thinly veiled as "loving others," targeting children especially; people in all walks of life being socially and civilly pressured to go against common sense, indeed against biological and spiritual reality, and "identify their chosen pronouns"; school-approved cross-dressing adults "twerking" in front of school children; institutions meant to educate instead "counseling" children to consider transgender procedures without the knowledge of their parents, procedures potentially cutting their life span by decades, not to mention their God-given fertility at an age when they barely know what that means. In other words, we are a short, fatal step from the insane, self-mutilating dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. Like the Theresian saints, these secular authors saw beyond, like the prophets of old, to the consequences of the breakdown of the moral and natural law, as the later Roman historians Livy and Tacitus saw in their own time. Livy said of declining Rome: 

The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these-the life and morals of the community . . . then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies. (Preface to The History of Rome)

I've always thought, for the West, that Rome is a type of "elder sister"; Rome is instructive, much like the trajectory of an older sibling. We are faced with a similar situation, one that Tacitus further outlines in all its cowardice and ensuing horrors: It is the attempted destruction of natural law, as a precursor to having the tempest become the norm, the erasure of all lighthouses, of all solid ground; furthermore, in what is called a "Post-Christian" world, it is nothing less than the loss of a heavenly hope. Our sins, like the Tower of Babel, are imploding upon us, and a sure sign of this is what the great philosopher Josef Pieper phrased as "the abuse of language"; he further delineates that this abuse of language is, in reality, an abuse of power, just as Orwell shows in the oxymoronic slogans like "War is Peace" or "Hate is Love." CS Lewis follows this trajectory of the breakdown of all laws resulting in a cacophony of language at the bitter end in This Hideous Strength, as evil and the human society that harbors it, finally implodes upon itself in a maelstorm of nonsense: language is the external sign of the deep natural law within us, that which allows us to reason about the reality we apprehend. When we give up this search for truth through honest apprehension and the rational exchange in language for a slavish, cowardly aquiescence to those who simply assert nonsense or harm through the use of power with no real authority (either real scientific method-derived or rational or legal), we are faced with the kingdom of Pandemonium and that spiritual being with no face left, who crouches within it and drives it without reason, except that of dragging as many as possible to their own destruction.

What we face, and feel the weight of, simply, is the demonic end of the road which started, in our era, with the religious nihilism, atheism, that which St. Therese of Liseux saw like a prophet of old; St. Theresa of Calcutta also saw the result of this in the loveless world beginning to produce the fruits of radical poverty and abortion--and loneliness. Both Saints responded with The Little Way. I return, then, to a moment in St. Therese of Liseux's Story of a Soul, when she is wondering what use she, an unknown, tiny, but star-like flower growing in a back wall of the Lord's garden, can do. The moment that returns to me is not her heroic inner fight with the despair of athiesm as she lay dying, much as St. Theresa of Calcutta struggled deep in her soul; it is the moment when St. Therese of Liseux, walking an elder, unhappy, crochety nun down the hall to dinner, suddenly inhabits the joyful dance steps of the Eternal Youth, Christ, as she decides to take each step with this nun in love: nay, Love. Love personified. She feels the power of it, that "doing small things with great love." She obeys this invitation that in an isolated state of human power, would mean next to nothing beyond the moment that it is in. 

Battles are not won by those who speak for the war, or by generals, but by the collective of small actions on the battlefield; the war is won, truly won, when the final cause for each action is Love, is God, for each soldier. 

I've thought a lot recently about the frustration I feel, similar to that of St. Therese of Liseux in the hallway with the nun: what am I doing in the face of the great evil of our time? I am not a great missionary, or one of those whom I believe will be seen as the moral heroes of our time, those who stand up publicly and privately in the face of soft and hard tyrannies, losing jobs, platforms, licenses. I am a hobbit, a common man. Yet, in this moment, as I speak to Angelina, sixteen years old, who lost her mother last year, as I reach out to hug her, I can beg God to use me as a conduit of His love and providence; I teach Jordan how dialectic can be a means to find truth in the confusion of opinions and intransigent emotions; I call a lonely family member each day; I speak the truth in love when prudent; I scatter seeds as I stay in prayer and offer things for those I meet in the hallways of my present moments; I make myself ready to be a light in the darkness, whatever the cost. Like St. Therese of Liseux, I may never see in my lifetime the bigger purpose for all my small actions; perhaps my frustration is ill-placed, in that I am where I should be, as long as I do what I can to love God with my whole heart in each moment—and my neighbor as myself. 

In these darkest of present moments, as St. Louis de Montfort implied, the smallest of actions like telling the truth, living out the natural law that is fundamentally a law disposing us to both love and to see God, at whatever cost, actions that in former ages would be simple common sense, are now sanctified and sanctifying. There are no more Common Men: only the choice between being a shade blown about in the tempest, adding to the darkness, or a star in the storm, scattering it. A sign of heaven.

My dear, struggling twenty-something,

 

I've been thinking about your struggles with yourself and where you might be headed in life, where you should be. I'm fifty-four but have the same insecurities, in a way; I've always struggled with making choices and feeling the peace of doing the right thing; I get frozen at points, afraid to make choices for fear of doing the wrong thing, taking the wrong path, often conflicted within myself about what excites me, what I want, where and what will match with me.

This morning I was thinking hard about it, praying, really....it has an intensity about it because of my stage in life...interestingly, we have that in common: we are both in a more intense stage of life: yours because you are just beginning your adult life, mine because I am looking at the last years of an active, working life. I thought to myself about whether or not God wants us to make choices, or to wait on Him to tell us what He wants us to do. Does He want us to make choices? I've made so many mistakes; I've failed so often. I've also succeeded in some ways. 

How have I succeeded? As a young woman, something deep inside of me was always looking for truth, for what is real, for the good. I did not put that in there; God did...but I loved that truth, that good, at times more than others...sometimes I ran from it, but deep inside, I knew that I was in some ways, running from myself, too, my deepest heart. I succeeded when I chose education (college over life in LA), a man (your dad who also seeks above all for truth, following Socrates, following Christ), when I chose life (you and your sisters), my students as subjects of love, no matter who they were, when I chose the Faith over the objections of friends and family, when I chose to love in difficult situations of sin instead of to look from "above that" and reject, when I chose to tell the truth in love. 

When have I failed? When I chose to make decisions from fear, and when I chose based on the self isolated from the good of those in my life. But there's more depth beneath the apparently thin line between success and failure.

I think, as I make decisions with Dad coming up, I have to think about what I want to be able to see when I see my life passing by as I die. What I want to offer the Lord. And I thought of the verse, "Where your heart is, there is your treasure." And so now I know my prayer, as I think about my final steps as an active adult: May my heart be in the right place...and then, as St. Augustine says, to "love God [with my whole heart, mind, and soul] and then I may do what I will." 

There is an apparent, paradox, though...the deepest choice of the saint is to consistently choose God over the self---God's will over my will. The only place this "Do what I will" and "God's will over my will" meets and makes sense is in a heart given over to God, a heart loving God with one's whole being. So I must focus my life's effort on loving God each moment, and then, unless He makes it obvious to my oblivious mind, I must do my best to choose what to do from that place. I will make mistakes, I will fail, but I think I will be at peace if I try every moment to empty myself and always carry a willingness (in love) to prefer His choices over mine if there is ever a cross between the two. 

This is the race. This is the adventure. This is the cross. 

Love, 

Mama

Aspen

Aspen, you stand white and spindly in the blank stare of the winter sun

The straight line of your mottled trunk juxtaposing the curve of your bare branches

reaching up with many-fingered hands

into endless blue.

My gaze is blocked by the sight of one, blackened, deadened branch;

black as the rest is white, fingers broken,
pointing downwards.

My sight returns to white.

I run anew up the straightness of your trunk, up the light path on your western side,

straight up, beyond your reach, spiraling
into endlessness.