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.

Emmanuel: The Look of Love

I have a vision at the center of my soul: the vision of the temple with waters flowing out from under the threshold of the door, waters that flow out to feed a desert plain, flowing higher and higher, flooding the dust and penetrating beneath its wind-blown layers, eventually waking up the seeds that lay layers below, the faceless plain suddenly burgeoning into grassy meadows and a line of fruitful trees along the flowing river.

When I first came upon it, I knew this vision in Ezekiel prefigures the Temple, the Lord God, and, somehow Christ; I just did not know why, somehow, it pertained to me. Like certain poetic and prophetic images which call to us, intaglios already present, it seems, on the soul, perhaps from the moment of our existence (which is why we respond to them when we find them spoken to us in some way, either through words, the Word, or images), this image challenged me, as well as defined me. But I never understood it.

I have lived all my life also with terrible images and intuitions and in-pourings of radical abandonment, which always seemed a mystery to me, as my parents never did this to me: I had a loving family (not without problems, of course), and many tremendous gifts. It was that I saw it, when a young child, as daily images in Afghanistan, and they called to me: the beggar, the primitive, helpless mud huts, the children vulnerable to violence, the terrifying vision I had in 1974 that Afghanistan would be torn apart by fire; yet, there were gifts given, as well: beauty in Greece, love, relative wealth in so many ways. As a young person, I squandered many of these gifts in my flight from the  abandonment and rejection I saw around me, and the resulting sins of despair, pride, and anger within me, lest it infect my life or lest I had to see myself as the marred creature I had become. One of the major ruptures in my life was to reject God because I felt I had trusted Him and been let down: I was a contemplative child--contemplation is not so lofty nor inaccessible, especially for a child--and I was His friend, His intimate; in my child's way, I knew how to listen to His silence; but as a child, I conflated peace in Him with peace in this life, and when that was shattered after we moved from Greece and I went through years of culture shock, loneliness, and bullying, I decided that He was not a very good friend. And so, I lost the Center of my life, and lived in my own shadow.

It took me ten years of running, of sin, of darkness and pain, and the grace of wounded healers in my life, to return to Him, and then almost ten more to come home to His Church, to a fuller communion with Him. I married a Socrates and my life of deep joy along with deeper suffering began in earnest. Underneath it all, in the place where I meet God inside me, still lay that image of water flowing from the eastern side of the Temple. I bathed in that water through the Sacraments, and I struggled with the pain I saw within people around me, within me, in the very call of the wind and the animals: the cry of suffering that Dorothea hears continually, in Eliot's Middlemarch. It is a cry echoed always in my own heart: I cannot build walls so that I cannot hear it and remain myself—yet I cannot survive the pain I take in, the pain I cause, alone. It is a kind of double-bind, the kind Fr. Keating speaks of.

As I look back to the time I began to understand that suffering had a place in the life of a Christian, and that indeed, somehow, God entered into that suffering, I begin to understand that what I have suffered with and feared most is rejection: I see why I began to learn how to simply love those who also seemed to feel that rejection; I could help because I was living it, day in and day out, had been familiar with it since childhood. The greatest pain, though, was as I saw myself, in turn, reject and slowly close off to my life, as despite my attempts at love, the process of rejection went deep inside and manifested itself in my body as I suffered a miscarriage, and a subsequent chronic illness that seemed to have a thousand faces of rejection: foods I could not eat, extreme chemical sensitivity, sensitivity to a climate, an atmosphere, and thus a community I loved but could not live in any longer.

In that image at the center of my soul, the water from the Temple seemed to have dried up; the opening seemed walled up, or blocked. I felt only confusion, abandonment, and a terrible murkiness; I felt again that terrible forsaking, and I realized again that this lay at the center. But I could not understand it. I have always cried out for simple, clear, friendly conversation with God, a conversation in which I cannot, will not, put words in His mouth, for a clarity of the path ahead instead of my sinful, prideful, idiotic stumbling around in the murkiness. I have had moments of such freedom that I wanted only His will. But then the fears come again, the feelings of abandonment.

Over the last painful and beautiful years in the high mountains, in certain moments, the water would flow again, pure and clear, when I tried to get out of the way and identify with another's pain in mentoring, teaching, mothering, and friendship. It seems to me now that it was pure because I knew I could do nothing myself. It was the greatest joy, the joy of motherhood, like the joy I have in being the mother of my own children, aware that I am not the source of life for them. I was not crushed by others' suffering in the same way I am by my own; I knew simply that I must be a conduit and lay that suffering down at the foot of the Cross--and so I wore the carpet down between my office and the little college Adoration Chapel, where Christ waited to take on the pain.

But, like the loss of Greece, again I have felt my sin, again, and the sorrow of leaving that little office in the downstairs corridor. I think now I was reaching another layer of wall of rock, pride and sin in myself that had to be knocked down. All I know now is that I am, again, perhaps through my own faults, in a place of abandonment and insecurity, wrestling with rejection and my weaknesses. I am not the child anymore so quickly conflating the peace of this world with that of God, but I am that child at heart, heartbroken and alone in the dark. Here, in sunny California, among my beloved cypress, bougainvillea, near the ocean, I see, as one sees beyond a veil, along with the love and beauty in nature and in others, more suffering here in this society than I have since Afghanistan, and I again feel completely helpless to help; I simply feel the abandonment, the rejection, the rage, the despair. One of my young students here phrased it well: "Underneath the veneer of relentless positivity, is rage." It comes through me, seeking solace, and without God I would have nothing but confusion, fear, rage, and weakness to offer in return.

Listening to a priest's thoughts on contemplation, though, has perhaps connected me in a new way to that image of the Temple watering the desert. He spoke about a surrender to love, a kind of annihilation of self which allows us to transmit Christ to those around us. This is what I saw within myself, this is the deepest desire I have: to be Christ: I have wanted to heal, to bind up, to bring joy, to suffer alongside, to watch a soul light up again, freed from fear and despair--for others, especially my students, I have the vision of the light that is before them, that will become who they are, glowing love in the darkness, Christ's particular manifestation in them. I don't have that for myself, really; I feel inside, when I look at myself, only selfishness greedily eating up that light, pride taking over that light and turning it into a solipsistic neon sign.

And I keep crying out to God, to the Blessed Mother, for that simple conversation in the sunlight on the back porch, for the end to the rejection and abandonment and darkness and fear that I know are woven into my heart, at times blocking me away from everyone around me, even from the color and wind.

The priest-teacher said that God is humble because He allows His creation to be messed with, in the hopes that we will love Him, because one can only love via free will. And then I saw Christ on the Cross, looking down on His people, the ones who mocked and rejected, the ones who stayed in sorrow, the ones who ran from Him because He was not successful; I saw His look of love, the look that sometimes, just sometimes, I have felt coming through me towards a hurting young person, frightened and alone, sitting across from me, the look I can see in my brilliant, honest, humble husband, a Socrates often rejected, a gadfly. This look is us, yet not; it wasn't just me--it was Him with my will allowing His will, His look, to pass to others in that simple way that I long for myself, always. I only know to allow it through myself because I feel the same need, the same desire, the same poverty as the person across from me. I have had the infinite privilege at moments to be Fr. Nouwen's Wounded Healer.

I looked at that image of Him at the greatest moment of failure, on the Cross, taking pain into Himself, sin, rejection, even abandonment by the Father, and returning a look of love; I have said to students before that this look, at this moment, is so beyond what a human can do--this forgiveness, this overcoming, this flowing of pain in, love out--is so astounding, especially when we know who He is: our Creator, our King. Only the most sublime can reach the true depths of humility, pain, rejection, and abandonment: a rejection unmitigated by any pride or sin that deserves, in some way, that rejection: this rejection of the infinite, the sublime God is the deepest rejection possible, and so His look of love is the greatest love. This is another image that has, in the last two years, begun also to call to me, alongside that Temple image.

And then I saw it: water flowed from the side of the Temple, water and blood from the side of the Lord: I finally saw the meaning, the fulfillment of the image that had been pressed onto my soul, probably at my conception. It was the end, the purpose for my seeing and receiving that image of the desert, the waterless, the abandoned, the fruitless, and then the Temple with water flowing from under its threshold. On the Cross, it is no longer a trickle under the threshold, but a full opening, the veil and door of the Temple ripped open, as Christ's side is ripped open and water flows freely. He is the greater, more open door, as He is the greater Temple.

Somehow, through the priest's words that God calls us to also be emptied so that we may participate in His Divine Life, I saw who I am, my vocation, and it was true, and yet awful. I do not want it, know I will be perfectly terrible at it in my own efforts, but it simply is me. It is the only thing that makes sense of the pieces, the patchwork of my life: To be one of those little people who can be the Look from the Cross, the look that is both the precursor to the physical water flowing from His side, a symbol of the greater Water, and also the actual Water of Love flowing out from the side of the Temple, the Look of Love from the Cross--it is that which heals, a look which is with, not above, but with. God with man: Emmanuel. 

 I cannot do it, yet I am, have been in it, doing it in a broken, terrible way, in snitches and pieces. It is the listening ear, the watchful eyes, the simple things one can do for another in the day, for that is all He gives us; it is the openness to let love flow out, taking many forms (whether it is food for the hungry, or song in a wretched silence, or taking on spiritual or physical burdens); most of all, it is seeing the great beauty in another soul, without the blindness of fear or selfish ambition. I think now, for the opening in the Temple to flow through me, within me, I have to let Him do it, be it--that is the simplicity and beauty, the light yoke. I have been doing it all my life, but seeing it as a punishment, or the result of some lack in myself which somehow I must fix. I have many, many faults, and lacks, which must be fixed. But to stop and let Him be, again, the carpenter, the stoneworker, the architect, to let Him open the side, and to let Him be the Water, the One who upholds it and does it...

...and is this all? Is the end, the telos, a hanging on a Cross, strung between heaven and earth, yearning for the truth of God to flow out? My daughter reminded me, after reading a draft of these musings, that the Cross is the not the end; it is the beginning, in a sense; the opening of the side of Christ is eternal yet always fulfilled in a greater end: the Resurrection. By my daughter's admonition, I was taken back to when I was a young woman, about the same time I found the vision of the water flowing out of the Temple, and my beloved aunt asked me to choose a 'life verse": It was Philippians 3:10-11, St. Paul crying out, " I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead." The depths of humility and rejection were, are, plumbed by Jesus, and He conquered them, did a 'spiritual judo' on them, on evil, and have made them fruitful, the fertilizer for His people, for the world if it will receive Him; the water flowing from His side will result in endless orchards where once was only desert. I am, like millions of other small souls, called to join Him in this: "If by my life and death I can serve You..."

Don't  fret because of evil men, or envy those who sin; 
for like the grass they'll wither soon, like plants will die away; 
trust in God, do good and dwell in safety in the land. 
Delight in God alone and He will give to you the desires of your heart. 
Commit your way to the Lord, trust Him 
and He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, 
and the justice of your cause, shine like the noonday sun.*

And now, with my 'mobile office' in tow, a super-rolly duffle bag, I again, at times, feel the water flowing out towards a young person sitting with me in various places around campus; Christ can love them through conversations about their intellectual thoughts and dreams, and their sorrows, all profound and weighty like the heaviness and softness of the Magi's gold. What a thing it is to find one's heart again, the pieces of one's deeper life in God come together, and to see it, and to say with St. Augustine, "Late...late.."Already I feel the failure; already I know that I will lapse into fear--but Lord, take it all, revive those who have, like me, become withered grass, turn the deserts into Your righteousness, Your justice, Your Look of Love, Emmanuel.




*Psalm 37

The Landscape Beyond the Leaf

In 1938 or '39, "Leaf by Niggle" was written, either in Tolkien's rounded, Hobbithole-like handwriting, or on a typewriter with impossibly crude, round keys on long, arching supports. I imagine him sitting at a desk in his home, a desk facing a lattice-like window patterned with the slow, downward dance of English rain, the drops shivering occasionally in wind gusts; perhaps, as he wrote, Tolkien wondered about the subtle, rather ominous rattling of the shingles on his roof: a true professor never knows quite what to do with ominous rattlings in a house--too practical a problem--so perhaps he simply incorporated the rattling into his short story about Niggle, and his neighbor Parish, who seem to live in perpetual rattling of shingles and rainstorms. I imagine Tolkien took the rattling into his fingers and his soul and made it, somehow, part of a great and deep parable about the landscape beyond the leaf, the work beyond work.

I just re-read "Leaf by Niggle" in the midst of great soul-pain: feeling rattled, blown about, unheard and unwanted in my own work, knowing somehow, simultaneously, how unworthy I am to be heard, how paltry is my work as a teacher and guide of young people in comparison to others, to my mentors, to the work of Our Lord in His lifetime. Within, we are all artists in a sense--we work on the art of rhetoric, or plumbing, or mathematics, or mothering and fathering. We have arts we perceive clearly as those we are working on, and we desire to be affirmed, to make a difference in the world.

Niggle, like myself, worked on his great painting, and like myself, he loved the sheen of light and color on single leaves; he built great landscapes around the leaves; they were details that drove meaning: like myself, he failed, and was failed by, his human community. His great work was housed in a shed on the remains of a garden; his neighbor Parish, an artisan-gardener, and highly annoying to Niggle, assumed what Niggle was doing was no more than a waste of good roofing canvas. Like myself, Niggle was also selfish with brief flashes of true charity, and was deeply wounded by being unseen--and like me, he was never sure during his lifetime of what, really, his art, his great work, his passion was all about.

After Niggle's death, his canvas is used to patch roofs, namely Parish's; the 'great work' does real work-a-day work by becoming roof-tarp to keep Parish and his wife dry under their rattling shingles. Yet, one corner of the painting, a beautiful leaf-spray with mountains in the distance, is found later on the ground below the roof, fluttering in the grass; it is framed and put in the museum under the rather lame, generic title "Leaf by Niggle"--and eventually, even the meaning of 'Niggle' is forgot in the business of life, of rattling shingles and storms.

I resign my teaching post, my community, now, and in great sorrow and pain at the leaving; I am primarily a educator, one with great passion "to lead out"--into the light beyond the cave, I hope--though, I, like Niggle, also paint--I leave at WCC paintings of leaves and mountains, and beautiful words of St. Bernard and St. Paul on the walls of the Latin Room; I leave my calligraphy and paintings of Dr. Carlson's beloved poems on the hallway outside my now empty office; my office name plate will come down soon, my title "Tami Kozinski, Faculty" is now defunct, and Mrs. K's office will become again an empty shell until another artisan fills it. My signatures "tkozinski '10" on my paintings and calligraphy will remain a little longer in the collective memory, but soon, very soon, "tkozinski" will have no meaning here anymore: just a name inside a black frame.

What is left? As the last semester wound down, I felt a failure in so many ways--so much sin in me, so many weaknesses as an artist, as a human being; I felt failed in many ways--unseen, unknown, unheard, flotsam and jetsam.

Then on a whim, I re-read "Leaf by Niggle"--it popped into my head as a help to my daughter, also struggling with feelings of failure in her art. We read it aloud together, and she had to finish reading it, as I was weeping almost with abandon by the end. In trying to help her, I was given also a great vision, a healing vision.

Niggle dies, leaves his art, his community, his neighbor, and must do penance; he must be healed in the hospital beyond the grave; when he learns the humble joy of diligence and anonymity, he is sent on to a land he recognizes as his own painting: it is the work beyond the paltry work, and it is built around the tree that contains all his beautiful leaves. He understands how to truly work on it now, and eventually Parish comes and joins him, providing necessary gardening artisanship--and they realize that they needed each other all along--Parish is astounded at Niggle's true vision, his work beyond his weakness, his art beyond his failures; Niggle is supported and able to finish the work because of Parish's expertise in gardening and his discipline.

I die, in a sense, now: Leaving, like all leavings--this leaving a profound one for me, a leaving of a deep part of my life's work, to help grow a beautiful institution that Our Lady wanted in Wyoming--is a death, but being here was also the hospital in which I began to learn my deep faults. I do not know if leaving here is a mistake and failure also (does Death also feel like a failure?); I only saw, like Niggle, what more I could have done, how I felt impeded or misunderstood, or how I could have done better.

Yet, in my pain and discouragement, in leaving, the Lord gave me the rare chance to see the real work I helped Him do here, and it was a landscape far beyond, but built around, single leaves: as they said goodbye, students began to tell me about the work I did, the image I placed in their souls, the leading out: it was the work in the soul of a young person for which the academics are only a precursor. They left little yellow leaves on my door, post-it notes: I found that I was seen as a model of what it meant to be a woman, a person, a teacher, a learner, a follower of Christ; I was taken by surprise at the depth to which my simple leaves rooted themselves in young souls, the landscape the leaves built.

The real moments, the true leaf-spray in all the work, the years, the attempts? Great teaching moments? My expertise? Not primarily. I kept being told that I "saw" them, or tried to; I "heard"...it was the leaves of love bursting from the branches of the classroom, the teaching, that did the real work, and opened the passageway to the mountains beyond, the mountains down which the Lord comes to meet the young souls. I recalled my inspiration, long ago, out of fear of the responsibility of teaching, to pray before each class for the Holy Spirit to use me as He wished : As a teacher, but more importantly, as one who, through writing and rhetoric, through counseling and just being,  I tried to free their voices, to hear and see who they really are and tell them they are loved and to have hope in the Lord, to speak about Him in everything they say or do, that as they speak truth, they speak about Him. In this, I know that it is utmost joy of the artist: To have God bring good out of what we attempt, to see Him make a beautiful painting out of our small attempts at beauty and love.

Rare, I think, in this life, does the Lord give us the gift to see a glimpse of the harvest, of our real work: He does this to encourage, to humble us, to set us straight, and because He also wants us to know that He sees us--since the first childhood reading of Moses' desire to see God face-to face, I also have burned with this same desire--and now, through my own real work of trying to see others in the midst our mutual lousiness, I know He is face-to-face with us, though we are often blind, though we are disfigured and swollen at times. Using Martin Buber's great term "I-Thou as the look of lovers," I know He is face-to-face with us, because He has the human face of Christ. Through this face, God is always the Lover. He tells me through this also to remember that my art is only done also through the help of my colleagues and neighbors, that He uses for my good even those who do not see me, or what I am doing. It also teaches me that in community we must humble ourselves to look and see our colleagues in the light of God's work, not our own.

Because of the glimpse of myself reflected in His eyes beyond my paltry attempts at painting leaves, I also know that each person brought into this world, even if only for a brief bird's life like my Ellie who died before even being born, has a real work beyond, yet somehow based upon the imperfect art each pursues and is, and based upon the deep and great foundation of human and divine communion that is necessary for the making of a leaf.

Kandylakia

Petros speeds away from Athena, east to the Aegean,
chortling a bazouki beat,
past olive, cypress, past confections 

in marbled cement, decorated by
tokens of human existence:
shirts pinned in positions of helplessness,
soggy towels, exiled plastic nothings.

Hand on handle in the back, I am
hanging on, filling up with west wind, my heart
rippling loose; I see Iris in the front
Germanically pondering the chances of death
as Petros sends horn-sounds around
the right side of a dwarf-Peugeot.

Roadside, a tiny church on a pedastal, a kandylakia, winks by.

I see inside for an instant.
Like the burning eyes of the young Greek priest
I saw once pulsing along Athinas Street,
from behind the small windows  red-lit, smoky saint-eyes
watch, remembering the world, 

and the long-ago accident that
hurtled someone through his miniature iconastasis,
that soul-sized door.

I am still too composite.
Rocking and singing past the red light and the eyes,
the sea-soil-olive air fills me still
like a lover's breath.

Fruit Trees

I have searched for you, Lord; Lord, you are ever calling me. And yet I am immersed in human language, those symbol-translations, rough-cut boulders as heavy, material-laden, weak analogies to the fluidity of the thoughts of the heart; I am always expecting you to speak to me in boulders, when you actually speak in that water, the wind, of the heart. I knew this better when I was eight, as I escaped the workaday world and lay for hours on a boulder in a pine forest on the Boy's Side of Anatolia College and watched for you in the light peeking through the needle-laden branches and the cloud-castles of a blue sky; like Elijah discovered, though,  I found you not most deeply in the light or the castles; you yourself were beyond sight and poetry. Like Elijah, when I kept my heart open to finding you, I heard your call in the small, gentle wind as it caressed the pine trees, and then me. You spoke to me beyond words, you gathered up my emotions, quieted my mind, sharpened my soul, and spoke directly to the center of my being, language clear and pure that cannot be adequately expressed in symbol or analogy or poetry, though perhaps the poets can come the closest to your language. I cannot write what you told me exactly, but it changed me, changed my life, forever.

Then I lost you, Lord; Lord, you ever called to me. Now, when I am tired of ambition, tired of trying to be something others want, exhausted by ego, I have begun to desire your voice, as I once did, childlike, again; the deer panting for the waters now, again, is one of your images calling me back. You had to crush my ego, my demands, and yet you have never let me fall irrevocably; you have helped me see that much in this world blinds us, but that nothing blinds us so much as pride and the fear that is the inevitable result of putting self at the center of the cosmos. When I began to leave all to you, I could hear you calling, though I had become again a neophyte in the language of the heart. So, you worked me through living parables, one after the other.

When you came to your people in Palestine, you became a living parable, and you told those who were not open to the language of the heart parables, "because though hearing, they are deaf." Your life on earth was a layered poem, an epic with many facets, many devices, many tropes and metaphors, to reach people of all kinds and all levels of openness, like a rhetorician who works simultaneously with a thousand tools, a master above all masters of the art of communication, and you did this, burdened by speaking with boulders to those who could not understand the language of soul-water.

You do the same with me, because my ears are clogged with the dust of this world now: ego, expectations, authority, property.

So, you called me again through another living parable; in a deep and hard decision, a life-changing one, you asked us to seek you, and gave us the grace to even desire, above all else, if only in the conscious part of us, our reason, our weak wills, Your Will. As a boulder-speaker, I was looking for you to just tell us the way. I told you, in the beginning, that "the desire in my heart is to be fruitful for You; it brings me the joy of being who I am meant to be; so Lord, I asked, please just tell me where you would like us to be fruitful; we both want this most deeply. To serve you and be fruitful for You."

Then there was silence; You seemed to recede. Why would you not tell us clearly? Instead, you began to make each way, each road leading away from this crossroads, equal; you kept us at an aporia, a point past which our reason alone could not go: I thought you were being evasive and cruel, and I cried out over and over; I was so afraid of making a mistake, of not following You.

In Adoration one evening, I heard you speak again in the water-language of the heart. You said something like "Of course you cannot go forward without Me; of course your way will be a disaster if it is outside My Will. You know what that is like, Tami. You have done it many times, and so yes, I confirm your intuition that You need Me. I am here." So, I went out, driving home in my beloved truck, rejoicing that the Lord would show us the way. Yet, the confusion returned, continued. My doubts, like the dirt rising to the top of the water when the pond is agitated, rose again and choked my heart.

It forced me to dig again, dig deep, with my husband, past the surface and into the layers of my true self. I found selfish desires from the past, wounding from the last ten years, and deep pain, and so much fear, and ambition, and ego, and also love and gratitude and forgiveness and repentance. I began to see that it must be about love, and trust. I watched my husband in his childlikeness and his humility; I watched him trying to lay down his life, his career, his desires, for me; I watched the beauty of masculinity pouring out self for the good of the family; I saw him struggling with his own wounds and fears. I felt alone, we felt alone, and confused, but I kept calling out to the Lord, more and more in the language beyond words, asking the Holy Spirit to speak for me, to call out the truth, good or bad, that still lay hidden in our hearts. I longed, with Moses, to speak to Him as a man speaks to his friend, face to face.

I began to see that we are, I am, hopelessly tangled in images, narrations, tangled in the boulders that choke the flowing river of the heart, and so as Lewis says, "How can He speak face-to-face to us until we have faces?" How can He speak to us clearly, pour out His water, when our hearts are boulder-like? So I went to His poetry, the translations of His fluid language into the pebbles that humans can finger, carry, more easily: I went to the Scriptures, and like a lost man searching for a trail under the leaves, I looked for him in David's cries, Jeremiah's exhortations and dehortations, in Isaiah's trumpet-calls. I looked for him in St. Paul's mysterious allusions. I called to all my heavenly family to help me, and I felt, sometimes, their presence as a fierce fire and clear, cold water, as pure and unadulterated joy that lives beyond the messiness of this life. They watched with me, they watched me like a mother watches, still and intense, as her small child tries to make his way across a narrow bridge over a rushing river. They were speaking to me but it seemed beyond language, somehow silent, or beyond me. Maddeningly, even, they seem to relate to me from the already completed pattern of my life, from that other shore, and so were responding with that end in mind rather than the immediate end I wanted, of just knowing the way forward. The answer was deeper, beyond the boundaries of my rational mind.

In my searching, I found again Jeremiah's poetic image of the river flowing from the east side of the temple, and I realized the Lord had given me that image many times during my life: the image that I, also, am meant to be His temple, and that water from my heart, where He lives in me, will flow out, and many fruit trees will be planted by and along and because of that river. He has promised me this, even when I least deserved this, even when He knew that I would go the wrong way; it is as if He says, "This is what I made you for, and I will bring it to fruition in your life, because my plans are not thwarted...I will bring to completion the work that I began in you when you first called to Me, came searching for Me among cloud castles as a child, came listening to the wind."

I found Socrates again in the Symposium;  I found, through him, Diotima, who says to Socrates, "This is the way of going": she is speaking about how, through everything we learn about, as we grow and mature, we are meant to ascend a ladder of love; we first only see the Good and Beauty in bodies, in physical objects, but as we grow, we begin to see that this Good in these particulars is more deeply expressed in the reason, in the will where virtues are developed, in the rational and then spiritual, and finally, to draw in another image from Plato's Republic,we come out of the Cave and are meant to "converse with Beauty" directly. Yet the lover of wisdom, of the Good, is speaking with Beauty (which implies a person with whom I can converse) and simultaneously must hold the glimpses of Beauty, what he cannot yet see fully, and must return to the Cave to draw others up towards this Good; in this life, we still must converse with Beauty and Goodness as He lives within the boulder-like particulars of our earthly life. In the Symposium, for example, Socrates is, at one moment, in contemplation outside Agathon's party, in direct contemplative conversation with Beauty, and yet after a time makes his way to the party and through the ensuing boulder-rhetoric, and just like Christ with 'those who cannot hear,' draws the others higher up the ladder of love towards a conversation with Beauty: one feels that Socrates, especially as he nears his death in the Phaedo and Crito, is living in two worlds: an increasingly pure conversation with Beauty and a difficult, painful, tiring conversation with those who still barter with boulders, an uncovering of Beauty where He is found in the particulars. Only one living in this tension, living along the Ladder of Love, ascending and descending, can truly teach.

Yet all things that have existence are good, and through their participation in Good Himself, they can speak to us in lesser or greater degrees of Beauty and Goodness Himself. It is not that we, in this life, can ever leave these earthly realities behind, and Christ has made it so that these earthly things will even be baptised into that language of water, of healing, of the heart, of His heart; in the fullness of time, in the fulness of Christ, creation will cease groaning and will become conversant in the language of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who is, in a sense, the spirit of Love that Diotima speaks of, that Love who 'sleeps out along the roads' always desiring and drawing us toward that Good and Beauty, and yet, beyond Diotima's wisdom, and Socrates'. He is also simultaneously the completion also, having no need, an eternal, complete, perfect Love creating within Himself a place of desire so that He can, in His mercy and self-giving, allow us a place in Him.  He hollows out a place for me so that I can "make up whatever is lacking in Christ's suffering." The Christian life, the Real Life, is a paradox of the union of particulars and universals; Christ is a living image of this paradox: He is God and man. Beauty and that in which it subsists can, in Christ, become one, can reach completion. It is a paradox. It is beyond language.

So, with Socrates, in my particular pleas for guidance, I felt deeply only that "I know what I do not know"; we stepped out in faith and in some darkness, but on one of two roads, two roads that He had made equally rich, equally blessed. And I realized the deep love in this; He had hollowed out a choice that we could make, really make, in peace and blessing. In that darkness of great light, a light so bright and full that it blinded us, I panicked again. What if I was fooling myself? What if we were harming ourselves and others, and being selfish? Only when you really try to be docile to the Lord do you find out how deeply selfish and stubborn you are; only when you try to fear the Lord do you realize how deeply brazen you are. You realize also that truly Satan roars around like a lion, ready to devour the straggling and the weak sheep of the flock, that fear and sin draw him like the scent of blood flowing from the wound in the leg of the lamb.

We reached out to mentors, the spiritual giants in our lives, those farther along the road to the Lord, both those older and younger than ourselves in the age of this life (for often that time-age means nothing in the realm of the Lord). They prayed and advised and encouraged. My mother gave me Isaiah 61, which speaks in another way about fruit trees being planted; it says that God will do the planting.

This morning, I listened again to the boulder-poetry given us by others who have tried to fear the Lord--Psalm 128; all I had to hear was the first few lines:

Blessed is the one who fears the Lord
The one who walks in the Lord's ways.
You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings will be yours;
The Lord will make you rich indeed.

I heard, suddenly, the Lord, speaking clearly in the language of the heart, and I cannot do it justice with these symbolic boulders, but I will try: He said to me, "Do not think about mistakes; you have done your best to fear me, both of you. No matter where you go, I will plant those trees; because you have tried, even imperfectly, to fear Me, because you have tried to cultivate the pure desire, in the heart, for My Will, I will condescend to follow you wherever you go. In fact, I will go out before you and the water will flow from you both, and I will plant my trees and make them fruitful. Because your husband is trying to not despise humility for My sake, and you are trying to lay down your will, even though you are both still proud, I will lift you both up."

I know that the lifting up, for the Lord, looks upside down to the world; it looks like a dumping into the dust, sometimes; but for those who look, ever, for Him as the source of joy, even His flinging one into the dust and beyond, His picking one up for any use, is happiness.

I have searched for you, Lord; Lord, you are ever calling me.