Zechariah

Zechariah was the high priest that year.

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

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

and Zechariah had the rope tied around him,

in case he had to be pulled, a corpse,

from the wrath of the Lord,

the rope a heavy chain to the world.

His bare feet slid across the marble,

the cracks between stones softly cramping his thick robes

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

under the tiered turban,

under the finely woven wool,

the cracks under his poor and bare feet, like Moses' feet before the bush of fire;

he offered and tended the fire in the Holy of Holies,

the sound of singing creeping in like ineffectual smoke 

along the curved sinews of the rope.

The thoughts of his heart were boulders, rocks,

falling, rattling, cracking the deep silence.

He again tended laying of the incense and the fire,

lay prostrate before the altar.

Silence approached.

Sounds of the singing ceased.

The silence was too great,

the fire and lamps too strong,

and the color was—

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

dancing.

"Zechariah."

"How can I be sure of this?"

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

Zechariah stumbled out of the Holy of Holies;

as he entered the outer courtyard,

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

beginning to pull him towards

their frightened faces,

their fervent faces,

their waiting,

ever waiting.

His enforced silence,

months only listening, and watching, and praying, 

folded in his deep shame,

he a priest, he so favored!

Ineffectual sight.

Now he must be silenced

before the great mystery dancing inside Elizabeth.

Slowly, as the spark set her aglow,

he spoke: "His name is John."

A Journey to the Beloved's Goal

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

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

"Do you mean...What do you mean?" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.