A Commune of Fear

 On a blue-sky day near the sea shore, in my parents' home, I sat with a family friend, a professor of education at one of those now-Ivy League, quasi-Catholic (well, I could say "formerly Catholic but now oxymoronic") institutions; she was writing an article about white privilege in k-12 schools, and had asked me, a former Trivium professor, to edit it. When I sat down, I didn't know what it was about, and simply wanted to be helpful. As I discussed with her sentence clarity, I came across a point that seemed illogical, or unsound, and thought naively that perhaps it was about syntax. 

"No," she said in her sanguine, kind, energetic manner, "I'm really saying that white privilege is systemic, and this means that all white people are, as a class, guilty of racism." I don't know if my mind fell open, or my mouth. When she got up to see if her chocolate cake was done, my philosopher-husband must have seen a train wreck coming, so sidled up and quietly, under the racket of oven door and cake pans said, "She's a cultural Marxist." 

This was three years ago. Since then, I've been trying to understand this concept, and why my immediate response was that it was unsound, illogical, and fundamentally, an open door for social terrorism. I've been trying to understand, why, when she explained her point, I saw fire; I saw individual people crushed under the weight of a nameless, faceless, uniformity; I saw individuals subsumed into class, into deterministic fate, into fossils, no greater than the sum of the irrational forces of survival. Now, as I watch 2020 unfold and reveal more apocalyptic bits hiding in every crease, I see this fire again, and I see now the fullness of what has been unpacking and unfolding over the last century, the last five hundred years. Cultural Marxism, and its parents, Economic Determinism and Communism and Atheism, have a pedigree reaching back into the thought of Darwin, and even further back to the "state of nature" philosophers like Hobbes and Locke.

What is cultural Marxism? Complicated question; one can experience it, though, in the 2020 focus on "systemic racism," "white privilege," BLM, and even, perhaps, on MAGA groups. One hears it in terms like "social solidarity," "corporate kleptocracy," and "dismantling Western nuclear family and patriarchal structures," to name just a few. You experience it in the persecution of sacramental churches, the herd-like narratives presented by corporate-owned media, virtue-signaling, draconian business and middle-class busting, and robust, corporate-run censorship on social media platforms which is just one dance step away from the censorship I experienced first-hand in Russia during the death of the USSR.

To see that all these seemingly disparate elements are species of Marxism, one needs to see the fundamental roots of Marxism, and this is a wide-ranging, historical and philosophical definition. Building partly on an older book by Dr. J. Husslein, The Christian Social Manifesto, we have to start with a parent of cultural Marxism: Economic Determinism. This is a materialist conception of history and human organization, built, I think, partly on radical idea of a "state of nature" in the seventeenth century. For the first time in human history, thinkers like Hobbes and Locke posited an "extra-societal" theory of the origins of human rights and behaviors. Locke created a "state of nature" which emphasized the individual's right to private property as necessary for survival, and traces early human cooperation to the need for survival around one's labor and property; Hobbes, on the other hand, posited a "nasty, brutish, short" state of nature from which escape was necessary for survival, period. One could say that these two "state of nature" philosophers are respectively the direct root of Capitalism (via individual private property rights and contract theory divorced from the constraints of the Church) and the direct root of Communism (via the Leviathan necessary to control a brutish nature). 

However, if one looks more closely, they are perhaps two sides of the same coin. The "coin" is the assumption, first, that a "state of nature" beyond, prior to, any human society, is possible (do we just pop out of random bacteria--oh wait, that's Darwinism), and second, that political order is a bandage and not necessarily a good in itself. This fundamental "sameness" can be seen more clearly when it is contrasted with political theory in Western culture starting with the Greeks. For Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and until the Scientific Revolution and the Wars of Religion (15th-17th centuries), the political life was, on the one hand, the means by which human beings attained natural virtues and the development of their faculties in accord with the discernible order of the cosmos, and on the other, during Christendom, the reflection in society of the natural, eternal, and divine laws. As Pope Pius XI says in Quadragesimo Anno: 

For according to Christian doctrine, man endowed with a social nature, is placed here on earth in order that he many spend his life in society and under an authority ordained by God, that he may develop and evolve to the full all his faculties to the praise and glory of his Creator; and that, by fulfilling faithfully the duties of his station, he may attain to temporal and eternal happiness. (39). 

The Pope is saying that people are placed by God into society, not that they decided to create society out of a kind of nothingness; he is saying that society has a final cause, an end ordained by God that is for man's good and for the fulfillment of his nature as a rational creature made in the image of God, who is Himself a society. This is so very different, contrary, really, to the idea of a state of nature and therefore contrary to the political and economic societies produced by "state of nature" philosophers. The pernicious element entering through Locke and Hobbes is determinism: we are determined, in some way, by the need for survival. Survival is the end, either one's very life (Hobbes) or one's economic life (Locke). These forces of survival become the determiners for political, economic, and social life. At the root of human life is antagonism; no longer is the focus on love, or on the rational and its development, but is rather on a balance of forces to create order: for hegemony and survival. In essence, human nature is reduced and redefined. 

This lens of primal, survival forces creates logical conclusions: in societies, whether Hobbesian or Lockean, the state of nature will become a herd or group-like balance of forces, and these groups, like the individuals in the states of nature, will still be fighting for survival. Not only this, nature is defined not only as fundamentally competitive, it is also a nature requiring either Leviathan or contract theory to order it properly: this means, in effect (especially for Hobbes) that man in nature was not able to see or discern eternal or divine law, was not able to relate to a Creator, or to be primarily under His authority, that family is not ordained by God and the primary authority after God. 

As things developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, the progeny of Lockean thought was the American Regime built on contract theory and an absent, Deist god, the ravages of the mercantilist model, and the capitalist movement from Adam Smith's laissez-faire private capital and the mysterious forces of the market, much like the survival, individual right forces of the state of nature. The progeny of Hobbes, I would argue, was the absolutism of the 18th century monarchies and ultimately, Marx. 

Marx posited that the real forces, the real ends of human community, were found in economic struggle. Dr. Husslein says, "The final cause of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in mens' [rational apprehension of logos or God's order], but in changes in the modes of production and exchange"(58). To me, this sounds like the economic version of "state of nature." Like the scientific revolutionaries starting in the 16th century, Marx was looking for impersonal forces, or certain empirical laws that one could use as the ultimate principle for action. Like the American founders, Marx saw that if one built a system on how people really behave, rather than how they ought to behave, one was more likely to predict what will happen next and be able to manage it: economic determinism was born. Also, like the scientists and political thinkers fueling the Enlightenment, Marx wanted to create and articulate laws independent from the claims of Christianity. 

Why? He saw religion as just another, rival, means of control, an opiate: he saw that Christianity held that God is both the principle of order and that He makes demands on us for our own good and fundamentally relates to individual souls. Marx desired scientific, empirical certainty so that human beings as a collective could control their own ends. Furthermore, to Marx everything was actually, empirically, determined in a materialistic framework and so it was worshipping clouds to accept the claims of the Church and 2000 years of Christian thought. This is akin to the scientific, political, economic, and even religious revolutions of the centuries after the breakdown of Christendom. Dr. Husslein states, "The method of producing . . . material livelihood determines also the social, political, and intellectual processes of life in general (59) . . . underlying all this doctrine is the starkest materialistic evolution, claiming the descent of man, body and mind, from the truth: the evolution of the family from a purely animal herd, and denying, on the other hand, the existence of anything except matter and force, thus doing away with God, the soul, and free will"(60). In other words, materialism means determinism, which means that responsibility is meaningless, and therefore, so is free will and all overarching, cosmic, true, objective morality checking any human institution. The system, the State, becomes the morality because it is the ordering principle, the First Cause. 

Here we see the deeper connections between Economic Determinism, the principle under all Marxism,  Darwinism, and Capitalism. The picture of our modern world begins to come together: empirical, materialistic evidence is the only source of truth, and a grim, narrow 'realism' comes to maturity. Human beings are a step away from brutes to be managed, determined by their needs, passions, and selfishness. Fundamentally, these modern systems are built on the abolition of man based on the Christian conception, a conception that holds a special place, because it is simply true. The only form of a god allowed in any of these systems is the Enlightenment Deist, "clock-maker," but this was a short step to atheism, and Marx was honest about it. 

Many people no longer understand the Christian view of man and society, and so a study of Leo XIII on Catholic Social Teaching and Pius XI, along with Aquinas and Augustine, would be eye-opening. In principle, though, the Christian conception of human life is built on Love. It seems simplistic, but it is true. If one compares in particular the different understanding of economics and property, one sees that Catholic economic and social teaching centers around the model of the family, a unit not only economic but that of love. Reflecting God's love in the Trinity "the Father and I are one" the family has natural  hierarchy and love and responsibility reflecting the reality of the Trinity and the Mystical Body of Christ. Thus, in distributist economic theory (the most Catholic economic model), the good and thriving of the family is paramount; private ownership of property is as widely distributed as possible, because a certain amount of economic independence for the family allows for the unit to remain a unit, and to have responsibility and self-sufficiency, and therefore genuine morality, within the larger society. Love desires the beloved to flourish, and Catholic Social Teaching is built on this end, the same end that Christ expresses in his last discourse before His crucifixion. In a true Christian setting, responsibility for one's moral life reaches into all spheres of society, and the inherent morality of politics is acknowledged and balanced with the "check" and authority of the Church, Christ's Body. The final cause, or end, of all of this, and all of what God does and asks, is our flourishing, and human flourishing can only happen when we move toward our end, love-unity with God. This reality does not ignore sin, and failure, and the failure of Christendom was also self-inflicted, but denying its truth because of failure is like getting rid of the idea of family because parents mess up, and badly.

This must all sound incredibly foreign, and according to most moderns, unworkable. We live in deep pluralism, or we did. As Aristotle says, the instability of clamoring opinions easily gives way to the one voice of the tyrant, especially in times of fear and unrest. In our culture, an uneasy pluralism is giving way to another form of Marxism, just as Our Lady predicted at Fatima in 1917. 

In these times of great fear, and growing economic unrest, people are feeling more acutely the drive to survive, and the forces of the fittest (the most adept at survival) are encroaching on all of us in the form of medical tyranny and communistic groups demanding total acquiescence around their platform of meaning. Yet, having banished God long ago from our scientific, political, and economic spheres, we are not turning to the Logos, the Truth undergirding creation and human life. We have lost our end, and all we seem to care about is survival and maintaining our standards of living at all cost--even our free will, even our God-given, dignified right to make decisions for ourselves about the most basic things. We are at the mercy of both rabid capitalists in the form of the corporate kleptocracy on the one hand, and rabid communist groups on the other hand, who say openly that they will dismantle what is left standing of Western, Christian institutions and principles, and even the idea of the nuclear family present in almost all human cultures throughout history.  The Good and its concomitant, the "common good," are being forced to give way to rogue economic and political forces. 

And, setting the stage, intellectuals like the one I started with are involved in this: The idea that just because I am white means that I am inherently part of a system (read: force) that fosters racism is, simply, social Darwinism and cultural Marxism. I am not much more than a molecule in the current of white supremacy, fostered in the political and primarily economic systems. Do racist systems exist? Yes. Do evil systems exist? Yes. However, reducing human life to a force, a system, is also evil, because it attempts to devolve my nature from a responsible, free, rational creature in relationship with Logos, with God, to an element in a "force." This is not any different than becoming a Marxist "worker" where everyone is the same, and equality devolves from the love of God for each of us with an eternal end to just sameness, where dreams die because everything is determined and you exist to serve the collective ("social distancing is social solidarity"). One is forced to live a lie, because one is forced to be less than human, and to see others the same way.

I see this on the "Left" and on the "Right." Groups are no longer individuals with personal responsibility, but rather forces untied from any true and justified knowledge; sophistry reigns supreme. Just look at BLM's mission statement about dismantling Western culture into some racial and moral Borg, and The Proud Boys' statement (by founder McInnis), in which the right to drink beer in peace seems to be a euphemism for radical individualism. Of course the groups are reacting to each other, and become more extreme as the others do, and so it seems that Marx was right, after all, and Hobbes and Locke before him. 

How? Because we have built our modern societies on fear, not love. We have taken Hobbes at his word, and Marx at his word, and Locke, who relegated religion to the vestibule of society. We have lost love, because we have lost God, who is Love. We have taken survival of the fittest to heart, and this, of course, produces fear and means that Machiavelli makes the most sense; fear then re-enters, more virulent than before, and we in turn create more systems to control it. 

We have lost our desire for eternal life, and so we fear death and crush the dreams of millions of people, their businesses, their property, their lives, in order to escape it, all the while being manipulated by both capitalists and communists.

Defining Conspiracy Theory: From Paranoia to Huponoia

          

"Conspiracy Theory" or "Conspiracy Theorist" are terms now enshrined in our cultural temple as easy, finalized plaques of pejorative judgment on anything or anyone that questions one's own paradigm, or the "consensus" paradigms. In plain English, the connotation of the various "conspiracy" terms is, I think, simply "paranoia," which is a conglomeration of the Greek root words "para"(beside) and "noos" (mind). In the Greek world, "noos" has a much deeper connotation in terms of connection to reality, to the cosmos (order of things), and so to be "para" or "beside" the "noos" is a much more loaded term: together these words mean a divorce from order, from reality. I think we think of this word, "paranoid," in similar though weaker terms, and besides, the Greeks also had the richness, the generosity, the hope to maintain some awe of certain kinds of "beside reality," or madness: there could be a Bacchic kind, for example, a frenzy that was yet mystical, in touch with some deeper force beyond human rational categories. Today, I think we mean more that someone is overly afraid of things, or makes conclusions not based in the reality of a particular situation; some people, though, we think we can deem as fundamentally and comprehensively paranoid, and yet we don't have the distinction in language, so the difference comes across either through inflection or expression, or we use different terms and syntax like "He is a Conspiracy Theorist" to make the distinction categorically clear (the term is loaded and the syntax redefines the entire person: think: "She is a dog"). 

The Conspiracy Theorist, for most people at present, is one who more-or-less has a kind of complete paranoia about effects and consequences happening in the world, more particularly political, economic, or spiritual issues. Thus to use it nowadays, such as "Oh, he's just a Conspiracy Theorist," is to relegate a person to a functional madhouse; unfortunately, no one in the modern world seeks advice from a madhouse resident, ergo that person is effectively cancelled from the community or discussion; he or she simply cannot be taken seriously or even mystically, and all their offerings are suspect, whatever the subject. They are at the forefront of the "cancel culture," made all too easy by the lack of personal, face-to-face contact that is becoming ubiquitous.

However, let's back up a little, maybe to a few years before the Mel Gibson movie "Conspiracy Theory" came out and played with and perhaps inadvertently cemented the present defamation. Let's go back before the term seems to have been weaponized as a way to defame anyone questioning tightly-held narrations: Before the first weaponization of the term and the later comedy, a theorist about possible conspiracies was one who theorized or made hypotheses and perhaps even theses about something going on behind the scenes, much like a detective; because of the complex nature of the issues (groups in power and groups oppressed by it alike tend toward secrecy though of course for different reasons, I would argue), the hypothesis or theory required some inference, or, in circular terms, theorizing--much the way a scientist should theorize about the complex natural world, using the tools of induction and deduction with the humility to remain open to falsification or the better model to explain the appearances. Proper theorizing requires the prudence to know when evidence is complete and absolute and when the situation is simply at some point beyond our power to have absolute knowledge (the latter most of the time, in all areas of human knowledge, I think it safe to say, because, as Aristotle points out, particular situations are subject to so much variation, we can actually "know" these situations less, than, say, universal rational principles like the Law of Non-Contradiction).

Based on this earlier usage of the term "conspiracy theorist," one can define the early American "Sons of Liberty" as conspiracy theorists. They got a lot wrong because of the Atlantic Ocean between them and the British Parliament and the wide ocean of intent and miscommunication that created a lack of transparency between the British overlords and the colonists, but they used what data they had, and made tremendous inferences from what could have been (or weren't?) malicious actions, like the doing away with the tea tax which precipitated The Boston Tea Party. The jury is still somewhat out about the intent of the British Parliament, but the evidence we have seems to indicate that it was, at least partly, a  misunderstanding, a conspiracy theory not quite on the mark. However, though, do we then say that the Sons of Liberty were fundamentally madmen who should have been locked up instead of having their portraits painted and beer drunk by ensuing grateful generations of Americans? Were they just paranoiacs? Were their thoughts totally unjustified? Or correct in some deeper sense (the intent to use the colonies in the new, and cruel, dehumanizing paradigm of mercantilism) and yet off the mark slightly due to their status as the relatively powerless? 

The jury is still out, I think, on the Sons of Liberty...at least, the jury that resides in my mind is...but it is a serious conversation, and one would never think to simply consign them to the madhouse of history along with inmates like Joe Stalin simply by using a weaponized term against them, the ad hominum stick of desperadoes and cowards. That, seems to me, is paranoia. 

The other option is to think of someone theorizing about hidden political, economic, or spiritual motives, or even not-so-hidden ones, as possibly a "huponoiac"--now, I really did make up that term, though there is a real word in there, another Greek one: "huponoia," from "hupo" (under) and "noeo" (to think, to perceive). I am defining this as someone akin to the myth-makers (Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, MacDonald, Tolkien, and others) who tried to uncover, to reveal poetically the deeper truths of reality, of existence, of the cosmos. Like terms such as "science" and "theorist," "myth" is another word we've murdered, cut into little pieces, put through the grinder, and re-packaged as something to sell as "food" at the local store. In truth, a myth is a poetic image that, again, reveals things too sublime, too deep to express in human rational categories alone. The myth-maker is not crazy by definition; "myth" is not synonymous with "false," although one could talk, as Lewis and Tolkien and Barfield did one fateful night, about the "false myth" and the "true myth."

I'm not saying a 'theorizer' about what is 'underneath' the events and consequences in our present world is a myth-maker--I was making a kind of analogy, as the myth-maker creates within the Poetic World, the world that is meant to reveal truth, the Logos, through story, through image, through rhythm, a road to Truth through Beauty, or a portrayal in some way of Goodness. The theorist about patterns of power is in a different category. This "huponoiac" could be some one who tends to think "under" or to perceive the underlying patterns, intents, and motives resulting in the effects and consequences we live with in our moral, political, economic, and spiritual lives. Not an easy task, but one can see a quite necessary one. The huponoiac could, probably does, get a lot wrong; but when one has resisted the temptation to defame in knee-jerk response to discomfort, like one kicks when someone sneaks up and pulls a scab off one's knee (yes, we've all had that happen to us), then it is certainly possible to judge whether one's interlocutor is a paranoiac or a hupanoiac, a Conspiracy Theorist or a theorist about possible power-structure agendas.

How? First, be aware of your own cultural and family and tribal attachments: they are largely subconscious and shot through with emotion: affection, fear, love, hatred, anger. Emotions and attachments are not bad; however, as CS Lewis says, anything not kept in the proper hierarchy will become demonic, and subconscious attachments are often feasts where demons eat beyond their fill and get you to vomit them all over others. Be aware that you have them, and that they should be firmly governed by reason and the doctrines and principles of the Faith (that revelation of true Logos), by true sanity. Second, cultivate an attitude of listening and the responsibility to do your own homework before anything close to weaponized-word defamation is even on the horizon; know the difference between claims about absolute truth, theory, and hypothesis.Third, if at all possible, get a real liberal education, which includes hefty, foundational portions of logic and philosophy. Seriously. You need to know how to think, or anyone and everyone rhetorically compelling, or even emotionally compelling yet idiotic, will tell you what to think: and if he or she happens to be the fad, or in your tribe, or can get you some power, or toilet paper, as the case may be, then, well, then, it becomes really difficult. We all need authority and belonging, but we are also asked fundamentally to use our distinguishing characteristic in the natural realm (rationality) and our distinguishing characteristic in the spiritual realm (free will). 

Huponoiacs, as I'm defining the word, are often the prophetic type in the spiritual realm, or philosopher types in other areas; these are people who listen for, look for, are gifted in terms of, the "hupo" or that which is underneath normal, more shallow categories of thinking and action. Sometimes they are just regular people who, through virtue and common sense and experience, and the use of their God-given sight, see. I think all these types are more rare, or perhaps more and more 'cancelled' in the fearful, emotional, selfish, irrational, relativist paradigm we inhabit. Modern science, now far from its proper place in the hierarchy of knowledge is now unquestioned dogma, and real dogma is eschewed for the Self. The upside-downness of Christ's kingdom, the scandal of the True, Good, and Beautiful, is becoming more intolerable to those who cannot think, or see, or hear, beyond the neon signs and cartoonish conclusions of the "right-side-up" elite. What should be obvious, what is simply scripted for us in open documents like Reset 2021 is considered prima facie false because it calls our nannies, our nursemaids, those who squirt their reality into our mouths, into question.

If someone questions the narrative of our global governments and NGOs and agencies and corporations and technocrats, look at the evidence. Not an easy task, if you can't think or you don't have access, or there's just too damn much. However, if you've got documentation and a clear logical pattern of centralization and manipulation; if you've got motive and means, then a conclusion, however uncomfortable or unbelievable in terms of our emotions and paradigms, might just be a good theory and not madness, no matter what the parrots on our screens say. If you watch something like Plandemic 2, do your homework on the evidence they present: don't just knee-jerk it because Bill Gates looks too nice in his hot chocolate sweaters, or Anthony Fauci looks so--small. How could someone that size pack a nefarious punch? Think for yourself, based on solid rational and spiritual principles. It could be, it just could be, that our governments don't have our best interests at heart, that they are fundamentally corrupt; if history teaches us anything, it is that this is the tendency of human institutions, and that no nation or tribe is exempt, except, perhaps, those who know they have that tendency and who don't kill their genuine prophets and philosophers, their huponoiacs, their "I beg to differ and here's why."

Back to paranoia: does everyone deserve a hearing equally? No. There are mad people about, people whose logic or principles are simply not in accord with reality. Historically, these are usually people or groups who have a lot to lose or are deeply fearful and thus desire manipulation, but there are some who've been driven a little mad by this valley of tears and deserve our pity and understanding, and a la Shakespeare, perhaps at times speak the truth no one else dares to say. The former lot deserve jail or worse, especially if, like many corporations and powerful individuals, they have killed or oppressed many people. They probably deserve the Eighth Circle of the Inferno. 

Do your homework and if you're confused, find good people who are willing to dialogue with respect and honesty. Look for those who've had a genuine liberal arts education and/or live good, humble lives; look for those, liberally educated or not, who show a clear pattern of laying down their lives (and not just self-aggrandizing disguised: Do they give up their place on dais? Do they allow others to shine? Do they genuinely allow dissent? Do they listen? Do they love you with a love that is genuinely about your good and not about looking good or about flattery? Do they need to portray themselves as experts and make sure you know it?). Look at the wide range of their thought and writing and action, and make a suitable theory about whether or not they are mad (See? You're now a huponoiac). Look at mission statements in writing (like BLM or the Communist Party) or look for, ponder in prayer, mission statements that are embedded: remember that everyone and everything has a mission statement, or principles by which and for which they act. As Aristotle says, no one acts except towards some good, true or perceived, some love. That 'good' or end is usually expressed in a kind of mission statement or statements, or in a pattern of action, and it is the end or purpose for which that person or group or thing acts. There are some obvious ones, like "corporations exist to make money." Period. Don't believe they exist fundamentally to make you more virtuous or safe, even if they have some good programs, etc.. Remember that modern governments exist for many different reasons, and that it isn't always found in some Declaration or Manifesto. Remember that Communists fundamentally exist to build a materialistic paradise, a replacement for heaven, for God, that they are "humanists" denying the proper end for humans. Remember that many people think they exist to aggrandize themselves or their political cause. Remember psychopaths are real, and they tend to run things because they have no scruples. Remember that Machiavelli was probably mad from being tortured, but that he described powerfully the way people act when their final end, their basic principle, is maintaining political order and power, no matter the cost, divorced from metaphysics and proper theology. Look to St. Thomas More if you want a picture of a good man acting on the best principles in the political realm.

If you can figure out how to see basic principles for action, you are on your way to true discernment of the world around you, and you are on your way to being a huponoiac. You may, however, have to deal with being called a Conspiracy Theorist if you happen to question secular or corporate or science dogmas (one is not allowed, for example, to remind people that the theory of Darwinian biological or social evolution is a theory, a model). Just yell "You mean huponoiac" and I'm hoping on a wing and a prayer (?!) that people who think a government that legalized the murder of unborn children is still benevolent somehow, and people who think that just because they have money are magically allowed become a medical authority for millions of people at once, and people who think that Marxist organizations care about the Good, will start listening to you.

Valley Girl voice offstage: "Nawwt."

  

Out of the Depths

 

We were snorkeling between the shore and the little rock island, my mom and I, that little island that lay only a few hundred yards from the shallows where the waves broke; to me, it looked--well, it was--much farther. I was about six--actually, I distinctly remember being six, because it was a topic of discussion about whether or not a six-year-old could make the swim with snorkel and fins, and I had pleaded and pushed: my sister was already on her way out. Every few seconds, I had been tracking her snorkel poking out of the water, straight and steady. It had looked simple and besides--I ran miles every day--I ran everywhere--it was a point of pride for me. A runner, a horse, a galloping thing, a bird flying low to the ground, I could walk all the way up to Panorma, miles above Thessaloniki, by myself (though my mom didn't know that). Nevertheless, the logic was easy: I could therefore swim a few hundred yards to that island, that other world, that place forever separated from land, a place that basked above the swirling sea. I wanted to go out there, and I wanted to even more because I'd heard my sister saying that she hoped to catch a glimpse of the bubbles from the divers below, to see them as they grew and expanded with the lessening water pressure, as if, as they rushed upwards from the confinement of the tank and the lungs deep underneath, they felt more and more free to be themselves, to be air, the closer they got to the surface where they would once again, be part of that greater air, their home. Though I could not articulate that clearly to my mother as I had tried to persuade her to let me go, that is what I wanted to be, a bubble...

I remember her sighing and getting up from her towel, brushing sand from her legs--in this present moment, I can see my mother young again, not so small and not so, so thin; her legs then were miracles of shape, smooth and artfully proportioned ("Except my knees," she'd say); her hair was long and dark, and her face was beautiful like a doll's. I know her again in this moment as a young woman, much younger than I am now, full of life and strength...and in that moment, she was the slightly annoyed but deeply patient elementary school teacher who saw the concentrated-in-a-cup dreams of a six-year-old child.

"Ok. I'll go with you. Just a sec..."

I hopped around, adjusting my snorkel and checking on my sister's progress every few seconds. She was so far out already! We'd never catch her. Finally, the shapely legs were moving and there was a hand for me to grab. We got in and started swimming; now I was going fast, confidently, and I began to relish the view around me, as the bottom, the boring sand bottom, faded and the sea took over, that great and clear Adriatic, great womb of beauty and myth, great storyteller, great wild one. Here I was in her, swimming, my mother beside me, just a little ahead; she would turn, her mask hiding any expression, and check on me every few seconds. I could swim to that island ten times and back.

I looked for bubbles, but the concert of blue, pale fading into dark, and finally black below us where the divers were, my father and his friends, was the only reality--and I wondered about my father. It looked so dark, like death beyond the upper registers of blue; color was somehow life, or perhaps it was light. There was no light down there, and as yet, no bubbles dancing upwards. I began to look for the bubbles as signs of life from the depths, but still I saw none, and the water pressing on me, the small caressing weight of it at the surface, became somehow tinged with malice. 

Then I saw them. At first, floating innocuously in their relaxed way, they looked like bubbles through the blue water-lens that was thick and slightly distorting like thick colored glass. My thoughts of the depths disappeared in a rush of expectation. As we got closer, they resolved into what they where: huge jellyfish, their heads pulsating like bubbles on the rise, but they were not rising; they kept themselves at the same level, their heads drawing entrails behind, and I knew what those meant: pain. They weren't bubbles, they were predators, and they'd got me a few times before; the searing pain reared up in my memory as I began to slow my pace. At first it was only one or two floating in front of my mask; then, as I turned sideways, right and left, I realized that it was a school. They were dotted in maddeningly regularity all around us at about ten feet apart; we were now threading through them.

My heart began pounding, and I needed air, but I was afraid to take my eyes off them; though I knew they didn't behave this way, every skin cell fully expected a concerted rush to sting the life out of me. I wavered there, finding it hard to breathe, feeling the thuds inside my chest. I finally just needed to be in the air, so I broke surface and ripped the mask and snorkel off my face. Head just above water, keeping my fins going below to keep me just at surface, I treaded water. My mom popped up and pulled off her mask. 

"I can't make it, Mom," I panted. She stared at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, just staring at me. I know now, years later, that what she translated was "I'm too tired to swim farther; I'm too weak"; what I meant was "I'm too scared of those jellyfish." Lost in our own translations, we stared at each other; I could see the island a hundred feet off, much bigger and closer; it looked enormous from the perspective of the irregular, rolling surface of the water. She didn't grab my arm or say anything, until, very quietly, she said: "You can make it. It is just a little farther, see? Follow me. Follow me." 

Her calm demeanor translated itself to me; something in her eyes and voice came through, across the rolling water, above the water bursting with mindless energy, above the wind wantonly slapping waves together, dancing facade to the horrors beneath. Strength came across to me, like an arrow, tinged with a certain firmness, steel-like. She put her mask and snorkel in place, and nodded to me. I followed suit, imitating, and I decided I would just watch her legs and fins and just go right behind her, like a little duck across the road. Pride was all gone, and I just wanted to get to that island. She threaded her way through the jellyfish, and feeling safe behind her, I began to look around again and realized that they were, after all, ten feet apart and they were kind of interesting up close. They even looked pretty dumb. 

I remember to this day the feel of the first island rock I grabbed, that rough yet slimy feel, that strange juxtaposition between the solid and the fluid; I climbed up expertly and only then did I notice that my mom, sitting beside me on the rocks, was breathing hard in relieved fear. "Oh, that was scary, " she breathed, as my sister came up with the predictable, "What happened?" 

"I'm sorry, Mommy, I just got scared. I am sorry I scared you."

"That's ok. Look, here's Dad; you can go back in the boat."

Later, many years later, when I had my own little children, my mom and I remembered this together; I don't remember the circumstances of the sharing, but I do remember what she said: "I was so scared; here I was with this six-year-old in the middle of the ocean and I couldn't carry you; I wasn't strong enough. I knew I couldn't save you. So I just started praying; I knew then to tell you that you could make it; I suddenly got the strength of will to hold it together for us both."

I then told her it was really about jellyfish, and we laughed. I told her it was really about jellyfish, and we looked at each other again, across the years, across life, and we could see one another again, both young again, without masks, in the air, close to shore, out of the depths.

He is Given

 

A whisper runs, dances gently, twirls in undulating arabesques, lifting my hair ever so slightly; it is the early, early morning, or late, late night---I am not sure which. As the scene before me gently reveals itself in the remaining starlight and the coming dawn, heralded by sleepy murmurings of birds, I discern in the dark two male voices, also murmuring, two grey forms huddled over a growing pile of branches set upon a cairn of rocks. I can only hear the voices as part of the landscape, much like the gentle noise of wind and bird; I cannot understand even where the words begin and end; the speech is fluid, undulating, arabesque, like rhythm unadulterated by instrument. The human forms are busy, in their fluid way: the more solid, bent shape stays at the center like a navel of the world, this little world of rock and dust and brave vegetation arranged in a circle around the cairn, the sage-like tree-scrubs bending toward the center, toward the solid man who is also bowed. The more lithe man-shape is moving deftly through the trees, almost like a horse in rope-training moves in response to the trainer at the center; he brings back choice pieces of branch and breaks off smaller branches from the larger pieces and places the wood, in response to the murmuring from the other, on the cairn, always on the cairn, piece by piece, murmur by murmur. 

The man at the center is revealed as he looks up from the cairn and toward the Eastern edge of the visible world, and reflected in his face, I see the light has been steadily, gently, inexorably, growing almost unnoticed. The wind stops and there is absolute silence; at this, the man's expression fractures ever so slightly, and I see that he has deep crevasses around his eyes; I cannot see his cheeks or mouth because of the head cloth and his luxuriant, flowing, white beard. Only his eyes and the wreckage of life around them, a wreckage that grows more apparent, deeper, as the seconds pass and the light grows and the silence weighs in on us. Even the young form stops and turns toward the East, toward the silence. My eyes invariably return to the eyes of the old man by the cairn, and I see that they are full of fire, burning still, a fire of desire. He stays like this for a long, long time, as the light grows, and we other two, I and the boy, we wait upon his eyes, upon that desire and the silence it draws in. My heart and mind argue as I think I see, in the relationship between his eyes and the Silence, Another. The reality becomes overpowering and I know there were never only two of them here; there were three. I see this Other in the old man's eyes, I feel this Other in the whisper, the growing pressure of the Silence, but this One impoverishes my ability to categorize, or perhaps I understand the poverty for the first time. I dare not move, but I feel I must kneel, so I do so as slowly as possible; I feel the tired, silky dust and the little rocks mixed in as they dig into my skin. The old man and the young one do not know I am there watching with a heart pressed in from all sides and a mind stretched to the breaking point. I leave my fruitlessly searching reason and return to contemplation of what is passing before me. 

The fire in the old man's eyes begins to fade in the face of the growing glow on the eastern horizon; as if this is a signal, he suddenly turns and attends to the pile of sticks; I hear a scraping and at this, the boy breaks also from his vigil in the trees and rushes to the center. I hear a murmuring, but the sounds have, almost imperceptibly, lost the elegant, arabesque-rhythm; they sound broken, like a record that has been warped and tries yet to sing. Singing is over, it seems; there are things which must be said, things that break the instrument with which they must be sung. 

As the small fire holds its own on one side of the cairn, so near--ever so near--to the protrusions of the larger pile with its flat bed of dry weeds and grass on top--the boy finally, as the sounds of speech die, holds out his hands to be bound. The Silence presses in again on us all, birds and silent predators slinking, ground animals in their tunnels, the tiniest insect arrested in mindless flight; I feel myself most akin to those insects, arrested, convicted, and I see myself as I really am, almost--not quite--but almost by nature convicted, almost made bound over, already condemned, condemned in the blood, from the very beginning, from beyond my beginnings; I see it as certainly as any sum demonstrated, an inexorable rock of reality. I am, in a sense, helpless, helpless as the boy whose hands are now bound, the boy who has now gone silent except for the groaning, cackling, whining branches protesting as he climbs with the old man's help; I can see now they are father and son because the old man's hands are shaking as he helps his son, a shaking that seems backwards, somehow: anti-shaking, hands not used to shaking, a shaking that should not be, but is, nonetheless. 

A massive, last groaning and creaking as the boy lays down; my head also down as the knife reveals itself in all its man-carved efficiency. 

In all that Silence, a whispering wind, undulating, arabesque: the Lord is in the Silence and the Whisper and the Light rushing suddenly across the dark blue-grey mountains, breaking suddenly free of the edges of the eastern horizon, rushing like a youth of a thousand summers, an unconquerable joy and life, dancing and leaping toward the cairn and the bound boy and the broken old man with the knife; the Light rolls itself in the surprised chattering of the birds in the trees, making each leathery, thirsty beak and leaf sparkle with morning dew, the salvation of the desert; He, Light, rolls and rounds in one spot among the trees, in perfect line with the Sun at the eastern end of the world, and a bleating is heard from the blinding, shimmering, exploding spot; Jason's golden fleece suddenly has meaning, its true meaning for me, a living fleece, golden with the Light, almost, it seems, one with that Light. 

The sticks groan again as the boy descends and the ram is taken, with unnecessary firmness by the boy, because it does not fight as he expects. It lays in his arms as a lamb would in the shepherd's arms; the boy looks at his father and something I share in but do not fully understand fills me: wonder, relief, yet shame and grief, grief and wonder mixed in the face of a burning, light-filled love that knows no death, no bounds, yet will resolve itself into creature, into death, for the boy, for the man, for me. 

The ram makes no sound except that which it cannot help, the gurgling of the throat as the blood pours forth in response to the stone blade, as the heart desperately pumps harder to keep life alive. Eons, eras, pass before the gurgling stops and I can stop my uncontrolled reaction of swallowing in mixed horror, disgust, shame. Silence returns mercifully and presses in, making it hard to breathe. My head is still down; I have only looked with my ears: the crackling of fire makes my eyes snap toward the drama in the center, an ancient instinct of self-preservation within me at the sound of fire, at the sound of nature being destroyed, and I pull my heart away from my instincts so that I can understand the scene and not simply flee with my strung-out nerves. 

As the fire caresses the carcass, dead now, no longer golden except where the flames eagerly lick hair and flesh, the sun looks across, growing in strength, and the birds begin singing, as if on cue from the maestro of the east; they cry out, not in the normal cacophony, but in one, minor note; as this note progresses, another note, from the sky, wafts down from a flock of the lords of the sky approaching, what I see as eagles or hawks, perhaps even vulture-types drawn to the carcass yet kept by the fire in the sky---this other note, firmly in the major key, takes over the minor birds and draws their note into a lovely harmony that turns sorrow away. 

He has been given. He will always be given. 

Death Throes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touching the Corpse

                        


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No other Rabbi would touch the corpse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaiah 53 continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love. 

A Mantle of Folly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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