*
After Elf suffered the devastating shock to be described soon -- soon, very soon, all too soon -- she ran to Elise for comfort and wrote frantic letters to Father Sam, not all of which were answered or could be.
*
Elise did not try to calm a person down but *was* calm -- a comforting distinction.
For some lucky persons, faith was of the whole body, not an outcome of the head. It grew out of the presence of God -- not of arguments. As to arguments, she felt it was not essential to spend *all* your time evaluating their internal consistency, but simply to ask: Does this bring me closer to the presence of God? Or separate me?
If it separates you, it can't be sound.
If the doubts and fears are going to occur, let them occur within the presence. So that when they leave you totally bereaved there is a relief nearby.
Elf felt no separation from God as long as another Christian was near. She was one of those Christians who needs other Christians around to model the life that sometimes falters in oneself alone. It was abstract unless you acted it out.
People have a massive power over us. A high-school dropout can kill the president if he wants to. But there is no one on earth who can separate you from the presence of God, if you don't want to leave.
*
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Friday, May 13, 2005
Soliloquy of a so-so priest
*
Kierkegaard: "If you do not have faith, then at least believe that you will indeed come to have faith -- and then you do have faith."
*
ACTING "AS THOUGH". People think of the acting profession as a lie -- as a way of generating fake emotion about a fake person -- making people cry about a selfish aristocrat like Dido -- but wait a moment.
What if the acting were true?
Look at yourself. (Oh no, I don't want to.)
Here you are sitting in your chair praying but that is not really prayer, only the beginning of the prayer. The prayer actually occurs when you get out of your chair and move through the world. It is bound to your conduct, a piece of your behavior, and that is how to "pray without ceasing" but do you? Look at yourself. (I just can't.)
You believe, you do believe but your actions don't believe. Your actions look the same as a non-believer's. He lives within a basic worldly ethics and so do you. He lives in selfishness with a slight tinge or savor of goodness. So do you. So what has gone wrong?
Look at yourself. You need to behave "as though" you believed, since you do. This "as though" is no faking but the truth. You do believe. You do believe but your actions waver. You need to bring them into true, into alignment with truth. You need to fill them with the one who fills you and this is the acting challenge of a lifetime: to be true and to walk in the truth. It is the "as though" of reality. Can you do it? Look at yourself. (Please no.)
*
Kierkegaard: "If you do not have faith, then at least believe that you will indeed come to have faith -- and then you do have faith."
*
ACTING "AS THOUGH". People think of the acting profession as a lie -- as a way of generating fake emotion about a fake person -- making people cry about a selfish aristocrat like Dido -- but wait a moment.
What if the acting were true?
Look at yourself. (Oh no, I don't want to.)
Here you are sitting in your chair praying but that is not really prayer, only the beginning of the prayer. The prayer actually occurs when you get out of your chair and move through the world. It is bound to your conduct, a piece of your behavior, and that is how to "pray without ceasing" but do you? Look at yourself. (I just can't.)
You believe, you do believe but your actions don't believe. Your actions look the same as a non-believer's. He lives within a basic worldly ethics and so do you. He lives in selfishness with a slight tinge or savor of goodness. So do you. So what has gone wrong?
Look at yourself. You need to behave "as though" you believed, since you do. This "as though" is no faking but the truth. You do believe. You do believe but your actions waver. You need to bring them into true, into alignment with truth. You need to fill them with the one who fills you and this is the acting challenge of a lifetime: to be true and to walk in the truth. It is the "as though" of reality. Can you do it? Look at yourself. (Please no.)
*
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Faith like a dial
*
If faith was a place why did one spend all one's time wandering from that place?
Was it impossible to stand still?
*
Faith like a voice of comfort came from the station. Like songs of praise that a grieving daughter played as she drove. God's voice was not doubtful at all, inherently it was free of doubt. The problem was the medium -- it was the dial that was the problem. It kept going off station. One had to hold it on station.
And this was hard!
*
If faith was a place why did one spend all one's time wandering from that place?
Was it impossible to stand still?
*
Faith like a voice of comfort came from the station. Like songs of praise that a grieving daughter played as she drove. God's voice was not doubtful at all, inherently it was free of doubt. The problem was the medium -- it was the dial that was the problem. It kept going off station. One had to hold it on station.
And this was hard!
*
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Under the swamp
*
On some days you would walk to the back of the gym through the doubtful mirror -- the one that stubbed your face when you thought it wasn't there but sometimes also mysteriously disappeared, letting athletes step into the murky back room whose silvered walls somehow conveyed the impression of being underneath a swamp -- so that was the gym's back room where you rarely went. Young men sweat there and picked up impossibly heavy weights. In the corner the Nazi Kommindant's Wife lay on her back neglected underneath a bar of weight. She rarely succeeded in lifting it and that was part of her torment.
She had learned many years ago that you could *not* live a holy life in the midst of evil while knowing the evil was there -- even vaguely and subcutaneously, even if you didn't know much -- and yet doing nothing about it. It was not that works could justify you but that the faith that did justify you blossomed with works as if involuntarily, naturally -- always -- or else it was somehow hollow. The works had to be there and they had to come second, be derived, and this she had learned -- and shehad even profited from the learning. She was as far from being a Nazi as anyone could be. The weight was something else.
*
What do I know about heaven? I know that it is not an entitlement. Heaven is not an entitlement and let me say it again: it is by nature not something of which one will ever be able to say: this I am entitled to.
Even the righteous never speak of entitlement because no true happiness will ever have anything to do with being entitled. Every happiness contains the work of being happy. the work is a form of happiness, it is being *involved* in happiness. If I manage to hold it up for even a second I am strangely elated, like a room lit from below.
*
God is good. He will not provide a coma on a platter. You will have no servants in heaven.
This is unimaginable happiness. It is not an entitlement, the ones who love God will never be a new upper class, nor could even want to be.
*
Will I be admitted to heaven? the kommandant's wife wondered. That I still do not know.
She felt she had a chance if only because the demons still tormented her, an act that seemed to suggest she was, even after all these years of suffering, still in play. The roulette ball dashing for its cover. I have not served you well at all, Lord. But today I can begin.
*
Duessa would go by and press the bar down into the wife's emaciated chest. Curse God and die, you bad woman. The kommandant's wife would feel strangely cheered by the abuse because it meant that she was still worth taunting and thus still worth saving -- still savable. Heaven is not an entitlement.
And the people exercising on the other side of the mirror -- on top of the swamp, so to speak -- would see a witch abusing a helpless old lady but they wouldn't understand what they saw. Their eyes were bewitched, half-closed. they reacted as though they were simply watching a television as they worked out.
*
On some days you would walk to the back of the gym through the doubtful mirror -- the one that stubbed your face when you thought it wasn't there but sometimes also mysteriously disappeared, letting athletes step into the murky back room whose silvered walls somehow conveyed the impression of being underneath a swamp -- so that was the gym's back room where you rarely went. Young men sweat there and picked up impossibly heavy weights. In the corner the Nazi Kommindant's Wife lay on her back neglected underneath a bar of weight. She rarely succeeded in lifting it and that was part of her torment.
She had learned many years ago that you could *not* live a holy life in the midst of evil while knowing the evil was there -- even vaguely and subcutaneously, even if you didn't know much -- and yet doing nothing about it. It was not that works could justify you but that the faith that did justify you blossomed with works as if involuntarily, naturally -- always -- or else it was somehow hollow. The works had to be there and they had to come second, be derived, and this she had learned -- and shehad even profited from the learning. She was as far from being a Nazi as anyone could be. The weight was something else.
*
What do I know about heaven? I know that it is not an entitlement. Heaven is not an entitlement and let me say it again: it is by nature not something of which one will ever be able to say: this I am entitled to.
Even the righteous never speak of entitlement because no true happiness will ever have anything to do with being entitled. Every happiness contains the work of being happy. the work is a form of happiness, it is being *involved* in happiness. If I manage to hold it up for even a second I am strangely elated, like a room lit from below.
*
God is good. He will not provide a coma on a platter. You will have no servants in heaven.
This is unimaginable happiness. It is not an entitlement, the ones who love God will never be a new upper class, nor could even want to be.
*
Will I be admitted to heaven? the kommandant's wife wondered. That I still do not know.
She felt she had a chance if only because the demons still tormented her, an act that seemed to suggest she was, even after all these years of suffering, still in play. The roulette ball dashing for its cover. I have not served you well at all, Lord. But today I can begin.
*
Duessa would go by and press the bar down into the wife's emaciated chest. Curse God and die, you bad woman. The kommandant's wife would feel strangely cheered by the abuse because it meant that she was still worth taunting and thus still worth saving -- still savable. Heaven is not an entitlement.
And the people exercising on the other side of the mirror -- on top of the swamp, so to speak -- would see a witch abusing a helpless old lady but they wouldn't understand what they saw. Their eyes were bewitched, half-closed. they reacted as though they were simply watching a television as they worked out.
*
Saturday, April 30, 2005
The ladies dancing – The rotten woman
*
3 ladies move synchronously in the studio while their light clothing, consisting of blue exercise bikinis, moves silently with them, hardly a beat behind. And as they dance they are very mildly disturbed by the sense of shadows on the periphery: men watching. They ever so slightly wish the men would go away.
And the men watching the 3 ladies think the world is perfect, beautiful, couldn't be better. They watch and watch, they take a breath and then watch.
The thing about our maker is that he is so quiet, so reticent. There are long swatches of our lives in which he doesn't impose his presence, doesn't impose. It is easy to play with the fantasy that his attention has been drawn away, for a moment or two -- that he is at least provisionally absent. As though things were explicable all by themselves.
The men imagine the ladies dancing forever. All will be well, no one will die, nothing intends to change, beauty moves like the workings in a clock. The ladies while they dance try to think of nothing at all.
*
In the shower the men wash themselves slowly and think of themselves as very ugly, which they are not. But this is the way they seem to themselves.
*
In the foyer, a woman with blue eyes discreetly adjusts her wrinkles and her jewels. She exudes the smell of money: a metallic mixture of flowers. How it intimidates by not being anything you can quite describe! I would like to join your little gym today, she says. I plan to become oh so very buff and, I don't know, drop 20 years from my age. Just like this.
Wrinkles like fled insects. Cut through the air. Standing in front of the stupefied clerk, Duessa does just that: drops 20 years in an instant. It is as shocking as if she'd disrobed. Look how terrified he is. His soul dangles a foot away. She thinks of tossing it into her mouth like a snack, devouring him. He sags into his chair. Not sure why. Not sure why.
Why doesn't she feel any pleasure? She has all this power to demolish people or, better still, make them small and leave them half alive, so that their death can be played with and savored. But it doesn't feel good anymore. It isn't fun. It doesn't give her any satisfaction to be bad.
It is as though evil were nothing more than a low fashion that had had its very short day. And when the day is past the fashion addict needs to go onto something new but suddenly there is nothing new. Because evil has eaten up the world and left no residue, nothing at least that an evil person can recognize. So there is nowhere to go and nothing to develop. The cultural entity is bankrupt.
She stands paralyzed. Her daughter, who doesn't even see her, walks past her and leaves the workplace heading for home, walking as though to a goal, walking as though having a goal, and so having something that her mother no longer has.
Damn you forever, you rotten little wretch, her mother says, watching her daughter transcend her.
*
3 ladies move synchronously in the studio while their light clothing, consisting of blue exercise bikinis, moves silently with them, hardly a beat behind. And as they dance they are very mildly disturbed by the sense of shadows on the periphery: men watching. They ever so slightly wish the men would go away.
And the men watching the 3 ladies think the world is perfect, beautiful, couldn't be better. They watch and watch, they take a breath and then watch.
The thing about our maker is that he is so quiet, so reticent. There are long swatches of our lives in which he doesn't impose his presence, doesn't impose. It is easy to play with the fantasy that his attention has been drawn away, for a moment or two -- that he is at least provisionally absent. As though things were explicable all by themselves.
The men imagine the ladies dancing forever. All will be well, no one will die, nothing intends to change, beauty moves like the workings in a clock. The ladies while they dance try to think of nothing at all.
*
In the shower the men wash themselves slowly and think of themselves as very ugly, which they are not. But this is the way they seem to themselves.
*
In the foyer, a woman with blue eyes discreetly adjusts her wrinkles and her jewels. She exudes the smell of money: a metallic mixture of flowers. How it intimidates by not being anything you can quite describe! I would like to join your little gym today, she says. I plan to become oh so very buff and, I don't know, drop 20 years from my age. Just like this.
Wrinkles like fled insects. Cut through the air. Standing in front of the stupefied clerk, Duessa does just that: drops 20 years in an instant. It is as shocking as if she'd disrobed. Look how terrified he is. His soul dangles a foot away. She thinks of tossing it into her mouth like a snack, devouring him. He sags into his chair. Not sure why. Not sure why.
Why doesn't she feel any pleasure? She has all this power to demolish people or, better still, make them small and leave them half alive, so that their death can be played with and savored. But it doesn't feel good anymore. It isn't fun. It doesn't give her any satisfaction to be bad.
It is as though evil were nothing more than a low fashion that had had its very short day. And when the day is past the fashion addict needs to go onto something new but suddenly there is nothing new. Because evil has eaten up the world and left no residue, nothing at least that an evil person can recognize. So there is nowhere to go and nothing to develop. The cultural entity is bankrupt.
She stands paralyzed. Her daughter, who doesn't even see her, walks past her and leaves the workplace heading for home, walking as though to a goal, walking as though having a goal, and so having something that her mother no longer has.
Damn you forever, you rotten little wretch, her mother says, watching her daughter transcend her.
*
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Dance as worship
*
It is worship. The person doing it does not even have to ask. Let's say a dancing master's instruction says to connect with movement space A and space B. It can always be done without grace. But then there is a way with every movement that fills it from within and turns it into how and not what. The movement is not merely done but done with a line that makes it beautiful and whole. You can feel that that movement has come from the world that God created perfect, "very good".
No words adhere to that movement. It is itself.
Of that movement you do not have to ask why does it exist? why was it made?
It completes its own why by being made.
An entire day can seem justified if you have made such a movement once. Making it is a privilege and a thrill. One two three, one two three.
*
However, every such movement also has a fluttering dark underside, like a ribbon.
The question always has to be faced: is movement like speaking in tongues? Is it, even though connected to God, not very edifying to the world? What work does it really do for the person watching it? Is it sterile? Is it, God forbid, "art"?
(Keep your head up, dear. Tighten those abs.)
Even if it is worship, is it a worship that is needed by anyone? Is it more like some musician showing off?
When a dancer has such a thought, her movement breaks and falters. It loses its involute quality, it hesitates and speaks.
(One two three, keep counting, love. At least you have that.)
"E cosa seria il ballo," dancing is serious business. The statement of a complete fool. Dancing isn't serious at all.
Nobody is farther from worship than the rich pagan who gets disturbed during her lovely yoga class because some child has run by and turned her divine serenity into a chicken salad. How could anything be worship that can't accommodate a child??? Or a noise? Or randomness? Or ugliness?
If it shuts out the world it simply can't be worship. The heavy lady lumbering to the altar for eucharist, she is a thousand times better dancer than you. She breaks the heavenly line and God rushes in, utterly happy to cushion the springs of her mountain. Always the low he likes to make high. So the crippled are better dancers than I. One two three, oh well. Start again. Incorporate your fall in your spiritual growth. You will do it again, be ready.
Elf the dance teacher floats through the training room. Generally she makes one mistake after another. The mistakes are the beautiful part.
Even if you don't make them, the mistakes are all still there. They are in the room hovering over you even though you don't make them. When you do make them it's just that they become visible.
So what is beautiful here is by no means made by you. It's yours as a gift. But only if you keep counting!
*
It is worship. The person doing it does not even have to ask. Let's say a dancing master's instruction says to connect with movement space A and space B. It can always be done without grace. But then there is a way with every movement that fills it from within and turns it into how and not what. The movement is not merely done but done with a line that makes it beautiful and whole. You can feel that that movement has come from the world that God created perfect, "very good".
No words adhere to that movement. It is itself.
Of that movement you do not have to ask why does it exist? why was it made?
It completes its own why by being made.
An entire day can seem justified if you have made such a movement once. Making it is a privilege and a thrill. One two three, one two three.
*
However, every such movement also has a fluttering dark underside, like a ribbon.
The question always has to be faced: is movement like speaking in tongues? Is it, even though connected to God, not very edifying to the world? What work does it really do for the person watching it? Is it sterile? Is it, God forbid, "art"?
(Keep your head up, dear. Tighten those abs.)
Even if it is worship, is it a worship that is needed by anyone? Is it more like some musician showing off?
When a dancer has such a thought, her movement breaks and falters. It loses its involute quality, it hesitates and speaks.
(One two three, keep counting, love. At least you have that.)
"E cosa seria il ballo," dancing is serious business. The statement of a complete fool. Dancing isn't serious at all.
Nobody is farther from worship than the rich pagan who gets disturbed during her lovely yoga class because some child has run by and turned her divine serenity into a chicken salad. How could anything be worship that can't accommodate a child??? Or a noise? Or randomness? Or ugliness?
If it shuts out the world it simply can't be worship. The heavy lady lumbering to the altar for eucharist, she is a thousand times better dancer than you. She breaks the heavenly line and God rushes in, utterly happy to cushion the springs of her mountain. Always the low he likes to make high. So the crippled are better dancers than I. One two three, oh well. Start again. Incorporate your fall in your spiritual growth. You will do it again, be ready.
Elf the dance teacher floats through the training room. Generally she makes one mistake after another. The mistakes are the beautiful part.
Even if you don't make them, the mistakes are all still there. They are in the room hovering over you even though you don't make them. When you do make them it's just that they become visible.
So what is beautiful here is by no means made by you. It's yours as a gift. But only if you keep counting!
*
The self as cracked
*
Imagine yourself as the softest substance, raw egg within its shell. When the egg cracks you fall through the white pieces of your container. You do not cease to exist, the self still exists, but you lose all control over this self that exists. You fall into God's hands.
The substance is now cupped in God's hands.
It will now be God who acts, not you. If the hands open and the self dissolves, it will be God's act, not your own.
How happy is the soft substance of the self, knowing that the acts that will occur will now be God's acts. The justice on earth that the self always wanted, without knowing exactly how or exactly what -- not knowing the least detail of its concrete shape -- that justice is now possible. The one who knows what it is will now be in a position to bring it about. Some blockage has been removed. Not you but your blockage, that has been removed.
And look: everyone is still alive.
*
Imagine yourself as the softest substance, raw egg within its shell. When the egg cracks you fall through the white pieces of your container. You do not cease to exist, the self still exists, but you lose all control over this self that exists. You fall into God's hands.
The substance is now cupped in God's hands.
It will now be God who acts, not you. If the hands open and the self dissolves, it will be God's act, not your own.
How happy is the soft substance of the self, knowing that the acts that will occur will now be God's acts. The justice on earth that the self always wanted, without knowing exactly how or exactly what -- not knowing the least detail of its concrete shape -- that justice is now possible. The one who knows what it is will now be in a position to bring it about. Some blockage has been removed. Not you but your blockage, that has been removed.
And look: everyone is still alive.
*
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
A vow about vows
*
So one vows not to vow. "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." So I will do exactly that, I tell the Lord. Indeed I will not vow, I promise you, I will simply do what I am supposed to do. Yes, but your old conundrum emerges like a sea monster, your vow not to vow is itself a vow. You must get out of words, Mr Soul, and let Body do the talking. Behave like a Christian, don't just talk like one. And Mr Soul nods his head and says: Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. I will follow what you say. I promise. I promise!
*
Tongue, you sharpened razor. Go back into your sheath!
*
So one vows not to vow. "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." So I will do exactly that, I tell the Lord. Indeed I will not vow, I promise you, I will simply do what I am supposed to do. Yes, but your old conundrum emerges like a sea monster, your vow not to vow is itself a vow. You must get out of words, Mr Soul, and let Body do the talking. Behave like a Christian, don't just talk like one. And Mr Soul nods his head and says: Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. I will follow what you say. I promise. I promise!
*
Tongue, you sharpened razor. Go back into your sheath!
*
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Do not do it!
*
Duessa as if threw her eyeball over the bus line from city to city, a remote device to watch the man she knew was corresponding with her daughter. And the poor man never knew. He merely shivered and faltered.
*
"You are good and you bring forth good." Father Sam made a vow during the previous Lent neither to touch alcohol nor to let the thought of alcohol remotely touch *him*. What a worthy vow. He would walk around strutting even when in fact he was sitting down. A dynamite vow! I am so proud!
Progress! I have made progress!
There was now less blocking of his own presence in the divine presence. And this presence was the summation of his faith. It was an inundation. Every Christian knows that belief in God actually follows from the presence, felt first, which is why all our proof arguments seem so futile and misdirected. The presence is the proof.
Look at me, Sam said. I am on the way to health.
And a step closer to my Lord. Because "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word."
Then came a bad day, when a stranger went ballistic on him in the corner store and his paychecks stopped and his health began to shrink inward. Lent felt shredded and full of holes, not forever, but just for an instant -- a tiny interval that was wide enough to fall through. My holiness is just a front and this I have always known. The stranger walked away, almost mindless -- like a robot that the devil had infected and used.
Poor Sam, how the bar called tohim now. He was inside drinking before he'd even made the decision to do it or refrain. There wasn't time to say Don't do it! There was no space for any vow. The devil moves at the speed of light or probably faster still, this is the privilege of its utter depravity. I will leave you now, please take care, Satan said. Such a soft spoken and caring person. Walked out of the bar, leaving his new friend bereft and hardly upright.
But in the morning Sam found himself on an old parishioner's couch. Shaken awake. Each second more more conscious of who he was and what he had just done. No no no. Only a complete moron would succumb so *easily* and be such a soft touch for evil. The shame of being so *easily* corrupted.
But Father you are never really cured of this one, his parishioner said. You have to step down from your little dais now.
But I made a vow! Sam said.
Oh but there can be no more vows like yours. A broken vow is just bad behavior. Why not try to behave from moment to moment until this turns into day to day, and then week to week? Save your vowing breath and use it to perform what it behooves you to do. Not so much later as right now.
Give it a try? Why not?
*
And the sight of a bottle finally came to turn Sam's stomach, so that he had less need of a vow and no need to break it. The pain had broken things in advance so that it was not a vow that now occurred but a different kind of revulsion, a turning away. And he let his body lead his soul away.
*
Duessa as if threw her eyeball over the bus line from city to city, a remote device to watch the man she knew was corresponding with her daughter. And the poor man never knew. He merely shivered and faltered.
*
"You are good and you bring forth good." Father Sam made a vow during the previous Lent neither to touch alcohol nor to let the thought of alcohol remotely touch *him*. What a worthy vow. He would walk around strutting even when in fact he was sitting down. A dynamite vow! I am so proud!
Progress! I have made progress!
There was now less blocking of his own presence in the divine presence. And this presence was the summation of his faith. It was an inundation. Every Christian knows that belief in God actually follows from the presence, felt first, which is why all our proof arguments seem so futile and misdirected. The presence is the proof.
Look at me, Sam said. I am on the way to health.
And a step closer to my Lord. Because "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word."
Then came a bad day, when a stranger went ballistic on him in the corner store and his paychecks stopped and his health began to shrink inward. Lent felt shredded and full of holes, not forever, but just for an instant -- a tiny interval that was wide enough to fall through. My holiness is just a front and this I have always known. The stranger walked away, almost mindless -- like a robot that the devil had infected and used.
Poor Sam, how the bar called tohim now. He was inside drinking before he'd even made the decision to do it or refrain. There wasn't time to say Don't do it! There was no space for any vow. The devil moves at the speed of light or probably faster still, this is the privilege of its utter depravity. I will leave you now, please take care, Satan said. Such a soft spoken and caring person. Walked out of the bar, leaving his new friend bereft and hardly upright.
But in the morning Sam found himself on an old parishioner's couch. Shaken awake. Each second more more conscious of who he was and what he had just done. No no no. Only a complete moron would succumb so *easily* and be such a soft touch for evil. The shame of being so *easily* corrupted.
But Father you are never really cured of this one, his parishioner said. You have to step down from your little dais now.
But I made a vow! Sam said.
Oh but there can be no more vows like yours. A broken vow is just bad behavior. Why not try to behave from moment to moment until this turns into day to day, and then week to week? Save your vowing breath and use it to perform what it behooves you to do. Not so much later as right now.
Give it a try? Why not?
*
And the sight of a bottle finally came to turn Sam's stomach, so that he had less need of a vow and no need to break it. The pain had broken things in advance so that it was not a vow that now occurred but a different kind of revulsion, a turning away. And he let his body lead his soul away.
*
Sonnet of postponed joy
*
The rain cries out Postpone
postpone postpone! and those who are depressed
decide to be depressed another day.
They know the sun will come indeed they feel
the sun remotely -- like a coil
of time whose darkness just repeats
our darkness of last year in silvery beats
a pulse to which the soul submits
so gladly secretly -- postpone
the happiness postpone postpone
the joy -- have it but not
quite yet have it but not quite yet
just savor do not have and so
joy comes and comes but faintly does it flow.
*
The rain cries out Postpone
postpone postpone! and those who are depressed
decide to be depressed another day.
They know the sun will come indeed they feel
the sun remotely -- like a coil
of time whose darkness just repeats
our darkness of last year in silvery beats
a pulse to which the soul submits
so gladly secretly -- postpone
the happiness postpone postpone
the joy -- have it but not
quite yet have it but not quite yet
just savor do not have and so
joy comes and comes but faintly does it flow.
*
Monday, April 11, 2005
This thing – this routine -- called “Worship”
*
Old time members told the story – for it wasn’t deep enough to be a parable, it was just a story – of the lady who’d lost her mother and father in less than a week’s time. The surviving family had come together to grieve and then her brother had slapped her with a lawsuit, some sort of pre-emptive move to secure all of the inheritance. That spring she would always seem to be heaving the dry offspew of blocked tears into her tissue with one hand while warding off the blows of her brother’s lawyers with the other. Only someone who has been through this can know how unfunny and grim it feels. And is.
She gained 30 pounds in 3 months. She stopped sleeping and thinking. Her little prayer book whispered to her and couldn’t console her – because in the first months nothing could – but it did keep her alive. Because those little prayers, she couldn’t feel them but somehow she could still distantly *know* them – know that their comfort still existed on the other side of a locked door. A door temporarily locked. And someday “they” were going to unlock that door and embrace her again. It was a promise. It got her through. But she admitted, just barely.
Meanwhile what? Driving to clerks and appointments, driving to offices, filling out forms. Living the semblance of a forward daily life. She seemed to spend hours in her car.
She would turn her ignition and corny Christian rock would come on and then her blocked tears flowed at last, because here was the place for her: the last solitary place left on earth is a car. And just listen to those songs! When she reached her destination she would turn the key counterclockwise and just like that the tears snapped shut, her face was dry. It was a routine as chaste as a rosary. A grasp of an invisible hand. And so very slowly she got through the terrible months until a sort of attachment to life returned (and the frivolous nasty suit was dismissed). She told her friends that she stopped listening to the songs but that they play inside her continuously nonetheless. Or like a lifted needle you could say they hover ready until they are needed again. (And they will be.)
Why did these songs turn her feelings on like a spigot? Why did she need the mechanism of the radio to enable her to feel what she actually felt?
She didn’t tell us that. But sometimes she would ask the other ladies what they thought: why do you suppose it is that when we already do in fact worship, when our faith is already a fact, why do you suppose it is that we need this routine, this entity, this weekly impetus and prodding – this *worship*? Why do we need this routine so very badly?
*
Old time members told the story – for it wasn’t deep enough to be a parable, it was just a story – of the lady who’d lost her mother and father in less than a week’s time. The surviving family had come together to grieve and then her brother had slapped her with a lawsuit, some sort of pre-emptive move to secure all of the inheritance. That spring she would always seem to be heaving the dry offspew of blocked tears into her tissue with one hand while warding off the blows of her brother’s lawyers with the other. Only someone who has been through this can know how unfunny and grim it feels. And is.
She gained 30 pounds in 3 months. She stopped sleeping and thinking. Her little prayer book whispered to her and couldn’t console her – because in the first months nothing could – but it did keep her alive. Because those little prayers, she couldn’t feel them but somehow she could still distantly *know* them – know that their comfort still existed on the other side of a locked door. A door temporarily locked. And someday “they” were going to unlock that door and embrace her again. It was a promise. It got her through. But she admitted, just barely.
Meanwhile what? Driving to clerks and appointments, driving to offices, filling out forms. Living the semblance of a forward daily life. She seemed to spend hours in her car.
She would turn her ignition and corny Christian rock would come on and then her blocked tears flowed at last, because here was the place for her: the last solitary place left on earth is a car. And just listen to those songs! When she reached her destination she would turn the key counterclockwise and just like that the tears snapped shut, her face was dry. It was a routine as chaste as a rosary. A grasp of an invisible hand. And so very slowly she got through the terrible months until a sort of attachment to life returned (and the frivolous nasty suit was dismissed). She told her friends that she stopped listening to the songs but that they play inside her continuously nonetheless. Or like a lifted needle you could say they hover ready until they are needed again. (And they will be.)
Why did these songs turn her feelings on like a spigot? Why did she need the mechanism of the radio to enable her to feel what she actually felt?
She didn’t tell us that. But sometimes she would ask the other ladies what they thought: why do you suppose it is that when we already do in fact worship, when our faith is already a fact, why do you suppose it is that we need this routine, this entity, this weekly impetus and prodding – this *worship*? Why do we need this routine so very badly?
*
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Poor rich poor -- sad happy sad
*
She was poor but she was rich. Her being rich was poor in that she didn't know how long (or even whether) it would last. So there was an inner poverty to the comfort she temporarily felt, a feeling of its only being for a time. Meanwhile her being poor was rich.
Poverty was rich insofar as it didn't worry and didn't bother about worrying. It was actually sufficient, for now and now and now. It was comfortable not because it was but because it had decided to be, no matter what. It didn't fret about what it didn't have. The moment it fretted it became poor, even if its supply of money was bottomless. Bottomless!
So the sense of being well off was a state of mind that had nothing really to do with money. Except that the state of mind itself was a bit like money, in that it could be collected or spent.
And if she thought about it in that finite way ("collected or spent") then she became poor no matter how much she had.
But there was always a point at which poverty stopped. And that point was always rich.
*
Prayer and behavior -- in the world -- they must be a single seamless entity, a garment with no seam. If you "withdraw" into prayer, well, a valid prayer does not *leave* you there, abandoned and withdrawn. Prayer is action, prayer is behavior. "Prayer changes things". What doesn't change must not have become prayer.
*
When I am happy I am sad. The happiness stops at a point. The world stands outside. Ummm, the sadness has an inner red seam that is already happy or at least will be. Not will be, is. It is there. And the self is always ready to turn inside out. The transience -- that men are "a puff of wind" -- that is part of the definition, intrinsic. The discipline to accept that sadness and live with that is... well, that's what happiness is.
The closer you approach the One who puts reality off and on like a garment, the happier you will be, even not to be happy. And the sadness -- that too is something you cherish and do not readily surrender. So it continues.
*
She was poor but she was rich. Her being rich was poor in that she didn't know how long (or even whether) it would last. So there was an inner poverty to the comfort she temporarily felt, a feeling of its only being for a time. Meanwhile her being poor was rich.
Poverty was rich insofar as it didn't worry and didn't bother about worrying. It was actually sufficient, for now and now and now. It was comfortable not because it was but because it had decided to be, no matter what. It didn't fret about what it didn't have. The moment it fretted it became poor, even if its supply of money was bottomless. Bottomless!
So the sense of being well off was a state of mind that had nothing really to do with money. Except that the state of mind itself was a bit like money, in that it could be collected or spent.
And if she thought about it in that finite way ("collected or spent") then she became poor no matter how much she had.
But there was always a point at which poverty stopped. And that point was always rich.
*
Prayer and behavior -- in the world -- they must be a single seamless entity, a garment with no seam. If you "withdraw" into prayer, well, a valid prayer does not *leave* you there, abandoned and withdrawn. Prayer is action, prayer is behavior. "Prayer changes things". What doesn't change must not have become prayer.
*
When I am happy I am sad. The happiness stops at a point. The world stands outside. Ummm, the sadness has an inner red seam that is already happy or at least will be. Not will be, is. It is there. And the self is always ready to turn inside out. The transience -- that men are "a puff of wind" -- that is part of the definition, intrinsic. The discipline to accept that sadness and live with that is... well, that's what happiness is.
The closer you approach the One who puts reality off and on like a garment, the happier you will be, even not to be happy. And the sadness -- that too is something you cherish and do not readily surrender. So it continues.
*
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Soup
*
A church bell rings -- in your head, not outside. When you recognize it, then it's physical sound, a vibration. It was inside first somehow.
It sings: true prayer is conduct! Prayer is conduct! True prayer is behavior.
Never pray for someone you can materially help without also providing that help. The help and the prayer: one seamless thing to God. A pretty garment.
So Elf's bones grew moist in the Christian air.
She could not close off -- moved in the mist of conversion, where being Christian still seemed easy, natural.
Free of the triple demons? (Avarice, gluttony, self-esteem). By no means. But they were placed, limited, parenthesized for now. She fed on God and fed herself with God.
Ordinary (?) people found her hard to be around. Her boss would complain about the times she would pause on the floor, move through a trance on the gym floor, in the middle (so to speak) of her own swinging arms.
I feel elated and I can't explain. Her own body spoke in tongues to her. No time or space to analyze this.
Serving the hot meals, she smiled like an idiot. That's all right. I am an idiot. With incorrectness she gave her loose money away. The "poor" found her a bit eerie, but interesting. You could say otherworldly.
Wrapped in time, not at al ltimeless, but in a different time going a different way. She hovered more than cycled.
When happiness walked the labyrinth in the porch behind the kitchen it would seem to sink into the turns and acquire a spin that difficult to carry back into ordinary, repetitive, humdrum daily life.
*
Depression would recur when she brought her gaze back to the people around her: from those near homelessness to those like Ainsley who were richly housed and miserable. Happiness was not an art to be taught, did not have prescribed steps, could not be passed on like a disease. If you scrutinized it coldly it disappeared -- like faith. It remained but wasn't yours anymore.
Don't just stand there, honey, you have to dish out that soup. Elf would fill the bowls so high that clients had trouble carrying them.
This is absolutely the finest soup in the world, Loopy Billy said one day. Listen, if you put this soup in cans and sold it, you'd turn the church into a billionaire. This soup is magic. This is the best soup ever made. (Pointing to a pot of zucchini soaked in salty tomato.)
Billy talked on and on in his sweet disorderly way, while in the background, behind him in the hall, Elf saw (but was too repressed to pursue) a familiar wraith moving from table to table, eating pieces of bread that others had left behind. It was her love, her true one, her lost one, now reduced below destitution, her beloved Dave. But by the time she managed to track him he was long gone.
*
A church bell rings -- in your head, not outside. When you recognize it, then it's physical sound, a vibration. It was inside first somehow.
It sings: true prayer is conduct! Prayer is conduct! True prayer is behavior.
Never pray for someone you can materially help without also providing that help. The help and the prayer: one seamless thing to God. A pretty garment.
So Elf's bones grew moist in the Christian air.
She could not close off -- moved in the mist of conversion, where being Christian still seemed easy, natural.
Free of the triple demons? (Avarice, gluttony, self-esteem). By no means. But they were placed, limited, parenthesized for now. She fed on God and fed herself with God.
Ordinary (?) people found her hard to be around. Her boss would complain about the times she would pause on the floor, move through a trance on the gym floor, in the middle (so to speak) of her own swinging arms.
I feel elated and I can't explain. Her own body spoke in tongues to her. No time or space to analyze this.
Serving the hot meals, she smiled like an idiot. That's all right. I am an idiot. With incorrectness she gave her loose money away. The "poor" found her a bit eerie, but interesting. You could say otherworldly.
Wrapped in time, not at al ltimeless, but in a different time going a different way. She hovered more than cycled.
When happiness walked the labyrinth in the porch behind the kitchen it would seem to sink into the turns and acquire a spin that difficult to carry back into ordinary, repetitive, humdrum daily life.
*
Depression would recur when she brought her gaze back to the people around her: from those near homelessness to those like Ainsley who were richly housed and miserable. Happiness was not an art to be taught, did not have prescribed steps, could not be passed on like a disease. If you scrutinized it coldly it disappeared -- like faith. It remained but wasn't yours anymore.
Don't just stand there, honey, you have to dish out that soup. Elf would fill the bowls so high that clients had trouble carrying them.
This is absolutely the finest soup in the world, Loopy Billy said one day. Listen, if you put this soup in cans and sold it, you'd turn the church into a billionaire. This soup is magic. This is the best soup ever made. (Pointing to a pot of zucchini soaked in salty tomato.)
Billy talked on and on in his sweet disorderly way, while in the background, behind him in the hall, Elf saw (but was too repressed to pursue) a familiar wraith moving from table to table, eating pieces of bread that others had left behind. It was her love, her true one, her lost one, now reduced below destitution, her beloved Dave. But by the time she managed to track him he was long gone.
*
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
The Eucharist Repeated (Part 2)
*
There were days when she felt like an uncontrollable child. She would fidget during the sermon, she would not attend to the mass of wordage they called "prayers". The music would push her away. And then the liturgy would begin, the story- telling, the blessing of the bread and the wine. Then they would all walk up to the altar, fat and thin, infirm and otherwise (if any otherwise). The priest would offer those things from the table and the people would swallow them, take them in. And no matter what -- no matter what -- she would return to her seat assuaged.
You could talk about the strangeness of a God giving as a gift what was not at all a separated gift but rather that God's own self. The words were ture but they were orthogonal. The Eucharist went a different way, did a different thing. It silenced the words. And she would return to her seat assuaged.
*
On some Sundays the established families would plant themselves in their seats without even looking around. Had Christ sat next to them, had he even looked like one of the classic portraits, they would not have been likely to notice. In a separate fluttering group, remote and not quite estranged, the so-called seekers would sit as close to the door as possible, expressing with their bodies that they were there and yet not 100% there or at least not yet... and what a long patch of space and time that "not yet" surely covered! Indeed the seekers did not like to be categorized, not even as seekers. They hovered like hummingbirds over their own sweet tasting hestitation. Can I just plunge in? When will I know the answer for sure? Is it all right never to know? Is it all right to stay where I am forever?
And the established families and the seekers co-existed as if *too* comfortably, their mutual tolerance almost saying that this incomplete state was the best thing attainable, a sort of final happiness, not even to be questioned: a good as the enemy of the best. And Elf sat neither established nor a seeker, not exactly, nor could she say se was in-between the two. Perhaps God wanted more from her.
The service was always too long, the interim pastor liked his own voice so much too much, and the congregation tried to routinize its exaltation -- the presence of the Lord -- as if it could be automatically captured at the exact same moment every Sunday, as though exaltation could be trapped like that, or isolated from this other strange hodge-podge that we call human conduct. It was always there but it was elsewhere. So her mind wandered without rest. Then the wandering suspended and the Eucharist began. She rose from her seat, approached. And even before she reached the altar, it always happened.
She was assuaged. She couldn't help it.
*
There were days when she felt like an uncontrollable child. She would fidget during the sermon, she would not attend to the mass of wordage they called "prayers". The music would push her away. And then the liturgy would begin, the story- telling, the blessing of the bread and the wine. Then they would all walk up to the altar, fat and thin, infirm and otherwise (if any otherwise). The priest would offer those things from the table and the people would swallow them, take them in. And no matter what -- no matter what -- she would return to her seat assuaged.
You could talk about the strangeness of a God giving as a gift what was not at all a separated gift but rather that God's own self. The words were ture but they were orthogonal. The Eucharist went a different way, did a different thing. It silenced the words. And she would return to her seat assuaged.
*
On some Sundays the established families would plant themselves in their seats without even looking around. Had Christ sat next to them, had he even looked like one of the classic portraits, they would not have been likely to notice. In a separate fluttering group, remote and not quite estranged, the so-called seekers would sit as close to the door as possible, expressing with their bodies that they were there and yet not 100% there or at least not yet... and what a long patch of space and time that "not yet" surely covered! Indeed the seekers did not like to be categorized, not even as seekers. They hovered like hummingbirds over their own sweet tasting hestitation. Can I just plunge in? When will I know the answer for sure? Is it all right never to know? Is it all right to stay where I am forever?
And the established families and the seekers co-existed as if *too* comfortably, their mutual tolerance almost saying that this incomplete state was the best thing attainable, a sort of final happiness, not even to be questioned: a good as the enemy of the best. And Elf sat neither established nor a seeker, not exactly, nor could she say se was in-between the two. Perhaps God wanted more from her.
The service was always too long, the interim pastor liked his own voice so much too much, and the congregation tried to routinize its exaltation -- the presence of the Lord -- as if it could be automatically captured at the exact same moment every Sunday, as though exaltation could be trapped like that, or isolated from this other strange hodge-podge that we call human conduct. It was always there but it was elsewhere. So her mind wandered without rest. Then the wandering suspended and the Eucharist began. She rose from her seat, approached. And even before she reached the altar, it always happened.
She was assuaged. She couldn't help it.
*
Friday, March 25, 2005
The Eucharist repeated (Part 1)
*
At Elfs covenant class, veteran members taught her the rudiments of faith but also and most of all they taught her that she was worth teaching. And this was a lesson that embossed itself on one's heart, on anyone's heart. Am I worthy of learning this? The members treated her with courtesy, with respect, with a certain subdued something that she decided was love.
And after a certain number of weeks, the group took a breath and seemed to agree that it was time. Prayer occurred, a meal, fellowship. She walked through an ancient forest with Elise, confessing how low and broken she felt. We know that, Elise said. Then there was an awful time of hesitation, a cleared throat of minutes and days, and Elf became the Christian that she already imperceptibly was. She no longer needed to cross her arms at the altar. The Eucharists began and then began to be repeated.
Father Sam, oh Father Sam (she wrote), I am the same thoughtless idiot as I was before, and yet now I am sealed. As if protected. Boosted. And somehow exhilarated, almost as if without a cause and this is so disconcerting.
Father Sam (she wrote), I am afraid -- that I might be a hypocrite and fooling everyone.
END OF PART 1
*
At Elfs covenant class, veteran members taught her the rudiments of faith but also and most of all they taught her that she was worth teaching. And this was a lesson that embossed itself on one's heart, on anyone's heart. Am I worthy of learning this? The members treated her with courtesy, with respect, with a certain subdued something that she decided was love.
And after a certain number of weeks, the group took a breath and seemed to agree that it was time. Prayer occurred, a meal, fellowship. She walked through an ancient forest with Elise, confessing how low and broken she felt. We know that, Elise said. Then there was an awful time of hesitation, a cleared throat of minutes and days, and Elf became the Christian that she already imperceptibly was. She no longer needed to cross her arms at the altar. The Eucharists began and then began to be repeated.
Father Sam, oh Father Sam (she wrote), I am the same thoughtless idiot as I was before, and yet now I am sealed. As if protected. Boosted. And somehow exhilarated, almost as if without a cause and this is so disconcerting.
Father Sam (she wrote), I am afraid -- that I might be a hypocrite and fooling everyone.
END OF PART 1
*
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Elf (Part 10): The boys
*
The day before her covenant class Elf stayed late at the gym and has to walk home in full dusk. There weren't very many bad parts in the town, the maybe weren't even enough bad neighborhoods really -- there were only a few blocks here and there that the residentialists and purists had forgotten to take a good look at. Some of these were demoralizing to something of an extreme. And one of them was in her path.
The boys stood doing so little. The boys stared at her. She suddenly had the most appalling sense of herself, something that she knew she had to hide from the boys: a sense that she was prey.
I am not prey.
But her sense of being only half a Christian hit her very hard.
She believed -- she was safe -- but one foot still lay wedged in unbelief -- it tried to pull her into peril that she couldn't even imagine properly. Nor did she want to. And then the ugliest boy in the gang took a metallo-plastic object, a tiberius, out of a paper bag and began to threaten her with it. To describe the apparatus would be to cede the story to a hoodlum. For such is the sucking force of empathy and imagination that, in a work of art, merely to describe something is to add a sort of hallowing to its meaning, even when you reject that meaning and everything it implies. And I won't do that.
So he wielded it and insulted her with it, saying: Happy Valentine's Day, sweet girl. And Duessa, flipping idly through the stations on her Cosmical TV of Evil, abruptly sucked in her breath and watched with great interest.
Elf looked at the other boys, at their liquid, rather nonexistent faces. She suffered a sudden horrible memory of wielding a knife, of cutting through a monster's substance in a visionary nightclub. Shaking off her memory, she took the thug's wrist and pushed it away from her. There was a small snapping sound inside his wrist, the crying out of a tiny bone. Then the punk began crying like a baby and the others, the ones with no faces -- they simply disappeared, gone almost without a breath of air, it was hard to believe that they had been there, that anything had happened. Ultimately nothing had.
The woman walked home, miserable now, feeling as if she had been raped, although she hadn't, not quite. What had been raped somehow was the innocent piece of ground that lay where she walked. One sensed a demon's shadow over the block she traversed. She prayed, hyperventilated, and closed her eyes.
Mother is near. Protect me, Lord.
*
The day before her covenant class Elf stayed late at the gym and has to walk home in full dusk. There weren't very many bad parts in the town, the maybe weren't even enough bad neighborhoods really -- there were only a few blocks here and there that the residentialists and purists had forgotten to take a good look at. Some of these were demoralizing to something of an extreme. And one of them was in her path.
The boys stood doing so little. The boys stared at her. She suddenly had the most appalling sense of herself, something that she knew she had to hide from the boys: a sense that she was prey.
I am not prey.
But her sense of being only half a Christian hit her very hard.
She believed -- she was safe -- but one foot still lay wedged in unbelief -- it tried to pull her into peril that she couldn't even imagine properly. Nor did she want to. And then the ugliest boy in the gang took a metallo-plastic object, a tiberius, out of a paper bag and began to threaten her with it. To describe the apparatus would be to cede the story to a hoodlum. For such is the sucking force of empathy and imagination that, in a work of art, merely to describe something is to add a sort of hallowing to its meaning, even when you reject that meaning and everything it implies. And I won't do that.
So he wielded it and insulted her with it, saying: Happy Valentine's Day, sweet girl. And Duessa, flipping idly through the stations on her Cosmical TV of Evil, abruptly sucked in her breath and watched with great interest.
Elf looked at the other boys, at their liquid, rather nonexistent faces. She suffered a sudden horrible memory of wielding a knife, of cutting through a monster's substance in a visionary nightclub. Shaking off her memory, she took the thug's wrist and pushed it away from her. There was a small snapping sound inside his wrist, the crying out of a tiny bone. Then the punk began crying like a baby and the others, the ones with no faces -- they simply disappeared, gone almost without a breath of air, it was hard to believe that they had been there, that anything had happened. Ultimately nothing had.
The woman walked home, miserable now, feeling as if she had been raped, although she hadn't, not quite. What had been raped somehow was the innocent piece of ground that lay where she walked. One sensed a demon's shadow over the block she traversed. She prayed, hyperventilated, and closed her eyes.
Mother is near. Protect me, Lord.
*
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
An imbalance to restore
*
Time passed, a current, a churn. The 2 young women, trainers at a gym, were stretching between classes. Ainsley's leg was raised in an impossibly perfect liftt. She looked like a beautiful slim bird. She pressed her spine into the blue foam and switched the 2 legs like a magician waving 2 scarves. They sliced the air acutely. Elf was a clumsier model altogether. She lay back and let that hard abstraction Exercise crunch her stomach like a hungry ogre. She was feeling too happy to concentrate. She watched as her friend seemed to "dance upside down".
Still I think you're going to have to do it (she finally said). You're going to have to learn how to pray for him and with him. I'm talking about, well you know who I'm talking about.
Oh no, Ainsley said. It is logically impossible. I pray but when the object of a prayer is so impossible, so false, then the prayer becomes false. And therefore worthless. No prayer is possible. Not for him, not now, not yet.
She had collapsed to the floor, as if invaded by an imbalance. The 2 of them began vigorously exercising, immersed in a willful pain whose purpose they wouldn't have been able to describe, though that didn't mean they didn't know what it was.
Elf said later: you must have been called to do this. The fact that it disgusts you so much is probably a sign that you must do it. Maybe. Why would something be disagreeable if it weren't also important.
But I can't have been called to do something I am physically unable to do!
I don't see why not. Lots of people have had exactly that happen.
If exercise is so painful yet necessary and deeply sought, wouldn't the same thing be true of the ultimate exercise? Namely, of course, prayer?
And if it were only easy would it need to be done?
*
Time passed, a current, a churn. The 2 young women, trainers at a gym, were stretching between classes. Ainsley's leg was raised in an impossibly perfect liftt. She looked like a beautiful slim bird. She pressed her spine into the blue foam and switched the 2 legs like a magician waving 2 scarves. They sliced the air acutely. Elf was a clumsier model altogether. She lay back and let that hard abstraction Exercise crunch her stomach like a hungry ogre. She was feeling too happy to concentrate. She watched as her friend seemed to "dance upside down".
Still I think you're going to have to do it (she finally said). You're going to have to learn how to pray for him and with him. I'm talking about, well you know who I'm talking about.
Oh no, Ainsley said. It is logically impossible. I pray but when the object of a prayer is so impossible, so false, then the prayer becomes false. And therefore worthless. No prayer is possible. Not for him, not now, not yet.
She had collapsed to the floor, as if invaded by an imbalance. The 2 of them began vigorously exercising, immersed in a willful pain whose purpose they wouldn't have been able to describe, though that didn't mean they didn't know what it was.
Elf said later: you must have been called to do this. The fact that it disgusts you so much is probably a sign that you must do it. Maybe. Why would something be disagreeable if it weren't also important.
But I can't have been called to do something I am physically unable to do!
I don't see why not. Lots of people have had exactly that happen.
If exercise is so painful yet necessary and deeply sought, wouldn't the same thing be true of the ultimate exercise? Namely, of course, prayer?
And if it were only easy would it need to be done?
*
Monday, March 14, 2005
What is -- no, where is -- discernment?
*
Discernment is not a human attribute, like one more thing that a person has or boasts; if that were all, we would hardly respect it. Discernment not only exists but, if you will, pre-exists. Pre-exists the discerning human for sure. A human can only attain it as something that was already there before it was attained -- a measure that knows the way to measure what in reality is -- what is -- but "what is" itself includes discernment.
It is not a ring you put on because, if you do discern (not many do) then the truth is that discernment is wearing you, not the other way around.
You can't boast you have it. It isn't yours.
It can't just be described and measured like the height and width of a house. It built the house and built the measure that measures the house. The act of measure is its own. It is not a thing to be manipulated and mistreated. The only way to describe it is to have it -- that is to wear it, to attain it, to let it well up in you. It is like clothes that you have borrowed, like a style that you have assumed.
Discernment isn't yours. And it is hardly impersonal. "For that we would be unclothed but clothed upon."
*
Do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it one two three four.
*
There is a paradox of involvement here as well as a refusal on discernment's part to be talked about as though the talker stood airily above it and examined it from the outside. There can be no tourists of discernment. The paradox is like the one about making a vow. You say to yourself that it is wrong to keep making vows that are not kept, that such behavior wrongs the Lord of all vows, who is also the Lord of *you*. So you say: I will stop vowing and simply try to live the best I can, day by day. A worthy goal, but this "rejection of the vow" is in the final analysis also a vow. So you simply cannot be uninvolved and need to stop trying.
*
Discernment is not a human attribute, like one more thing that a person has or boasts; if that were all, we would hardly respect it. Discernment not only exists but, if you will, pre-exists. Pre-exists the discerning human for sure. A human can only attain it as something that was already there before it was attained -- a measure that knows the way to measure what in reality is -- what is -- but "what is" itself includes discernment.
It is not a ring you put on because, if you do discern (not many do) then the truth is that discernment is wearing you, not the other way around.
You can't boast you have it. It isn't yours.
It can't just be described and measured like the height and width of a house. It built the house and built the measure that measures the house. The act of measure is its own. It is not a thing to be manipulated and mistreated. The only way to describe it is to have it -- that is to wear it, to attain it, to let it well up in you. It is like clothes that you have borrowed, like a style that you have assumed.
Discernment isn't yours. And it is hardly impersonal. "For that we would be unclothed but clothed upon."
*
Do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it one two three four.
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There is a paradox of involvement here as well as a refusal on discernment's part to be talked about as though the talker stood airily above it and examined it from the outside. There can be no tourists of discernment. The paradox is like the one about making a vow. You say to yourself that it is wrong to keep making vows that are not kept, that such behavior wrongs the Lord of all vows, who is also the Lord of *you*. So you say: I will stop vowing and simply try to live the best I can, day by day. A worthy goal, but this "rejection of the vow" is in the final analysis also a vow. So you simply cannot be uninvolved and need to stop trying.
*
Friday, March 11, 2005
Continuation
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How can I? Ainsley said. I want to but how can I? You can't pray for something that voids your mouth and makes your prayer nonexistent.
So the girls sat talking.
I cna't do it, Ainsley said, not won't but can't. How do I pray for the social security I love and at the same time for *him*?
It is like praying no prayer.
Elise carefully sat silent. She let the girls go on talking. She embraced listening as a discipline. A long pause.
What I think you do (Elf said) is pray for his discernment. You leave a little space there. You are pretty sure you know what he *should* discern but you don't pray for *that*.
You simply pray for discernment, more or less throwing your own self into God's hands. Then you don't look down!
There is a right way, there must be, so you pray for him to find it. Security is worth praying for. He must think so too. (A long pause.)
*
Elf (Elise said) you are a person of discernment yourself, a person of faith. I am glad you are a part of this parish.
Because you discern discernment very well.
(However, discernment is nothing without vigilance.)
*
How can I? Ainsley said. I want to but how can I? You can't pray for something that voids your mouth and makes your prayer nonexistent.
So the girls sat talking.
I cna't do it, Ainsley said, not won't but can't. How do I pray for the social security I love and at the same time for *him*?
It is like praying no prayer.
Elise carefully sat silent. She let the girls go on talking. She embraced listening as a discipline. A long pause.
What I think you do (Elf said) is pray for his discernment. You leave a little space there. You are pretty sure you know what he *should* discern but you don't pray for *that*.
You simply pray for discernment, more or less throwing your own self into God's hands. Then you don't look down!
There is a right way, there must be, so you pray for him to find it. Security is worth praying for. He must think so too. (A long pause.)
*
Elf (Elise said) you are a person of discernment yourself, a person of faith. I am glad you are a part of this parish.
Because you discern discernment very well.
(However, discernment is nothing without vigilance.)
*
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