The Pause that Refreshes

Not exactly a warm Christmas wish, or prayer even. But if I may be allowed an excuse, I'd like to think it's a reflection more or less in keeping with a season whose God became enfleshed in our world in just the Way that He did. So quietly and without visible glory (not to belabor the obvious). And whose Love, even at its "fiercest," somehow continues to respect both our frailty and our freedom. So here goes:

In a busily progressive world like ours today, where

1) the  depth of one's love is too often measured by the fierceness of one's activity; where

2) the purity and zeal of our activism is gauged by our determination to change the thing we love; and where 

3) the success of our change depends on the degree of our control, 

what a relief it is to know that love can also be gentle. What a comfort it is to know that even love, without the least dereliction of duty, is sometimes content to let a creature be, and be itself; and all so that it may be known and loved more patiently, more Divinely, for what it is. Last of all, what a grace and a hope it is, to know that no amount of even the most selfless, idealistic, well-intentioned control is ever going to disclose what any creature is, or what it needs, or even how it must change for the supplying of those needs: - in short, no amount of control is ever going to love or improve any creature better than that gentlest of all loves we call prayer.

So What Do I Mean by Man?

First of all, I would distinguish Man as that one creature, in all of creation, who makes no sense apart from the most close-grained, intimate, yielding, surrendering dependence upon God. He is also that one who makes less and less sense - i.e., becomes infinitessimally that much less both useful and beautiful to anyone - insofar as he flees from or denies that dependence.

Again, what makes us most distinctly human - which is to say, most resonantly, permanently, Divinely human - is not anything which makes us more independent of nature, or detachable or divorcible from nature. Even less is it that which disregards, distorts or subverts our human nature. (And remember, there's nothing like naked, unashamed derision and contempt of nature as a whole for eviscerating our own humanness). 

What makes us most like the First Man, then? It is that intimate, intricate, inextricable dependence on God which defined Adam from the Beginning - at the very height of his dominion over creation - as something radically distinct from either angels or beasts. Something that made him almost as pliant and yielding in the hands of his Father as, indeed, the Second Adam was to become, in that fulness of salvific time which we know as His passion and death. It is also, I'm inclined to believe, what may have inspired the first Scriptural authors to characterize us all, at our most truly and Divinely human, as by nature sheep, rather than goats.

(Everything) In its Right Measure

"Man is the measure of all things," says Protagoras.

And true enough, I suspect, as far as it goes. Only which man are we talking about? And at precisely what stage or chapter of his so-called progress? Is it Adam as he first discovered and explored, and personally named each one of the creatures of the Garden? Or Adam as he has since cacophonized every echo, rumor and haunting of Eden beyond recognition? 

More to the point of our present needs, do we mean that Man who, in grasping at the pride of life, succeeded only in fouling his own nest, and hopelessly defacing his own Divine image? Or do we mean that Man who, in accepting a sacrificial death, actually redeemed and restored that Image beyond anyone's wildest hopes? Be sure to make your choice prayerfully. Because in each case, which Man we take as our measure is sure to make all the difference: both in how we ourselves mete out either mercy or justice, and in how we receive the same.

"There is nothing good except a good will," says Kant.

Well, maybe. But just where does does that leave the rest of the visible creation, in the moral scheme of things? That same creation which (as presumably even Kant would attest) - while having nothing like a human, much less an angelic or Divine will - is nonetheless created by God? And which even the Scriptural author pronounces, with exquisite naivete, as "very good"? 

For me the question is simply this: Just how is man is affected - for better or worse - when what was "once" a goodness shared throughout the visible universe "now" becomes a human monopoly. Remember, monopolies, even with best of  intentions, don't always make for the sincerest humility in those who wield them. So what do you think? Is this exclusive prerogative apt to make man a more amicable or a more quarrelsome neighbor to earth's other creatures? Indeed, given his vantage-point of moral elevation, will he be that much less, or that much more, likely to set a fairly rigid, and presumptuous, agenda for everything else?

Consider what may follow, then, in a visible universe where only human beings, human priorities, human actions can be considered unambiguously good. Is it just me, or does that limit change irrevocably the nature and character of a well-lived, morally upright life? So that it becomes somehow more and more a question of control? A matter of bringing under our hegemony things that, left to themselves, likely will fail to conduce fully or adequately to the good we intend? Mind you, the rest of the non-human world remains stubbornly what it is the whole time. And worst of all in a way that, too often, not only eludes our control, but sometimes has the supreme nerve to impinge upon us, and interfere with us! Like most forms of weather, for instance. And so we build houses and other enclosures; we try, singly or collectively, to carve out an amenable space within these more humanly controlled boundaries, where all our goodness, our benevolence, our constructive desire for change can progress unhindered. The problem lies in that word, and realm, we call collective. The problem is that most of the good, and the change, we try to initiate rarely if ever concerns just one person. Even more rarely does it affect just one person. And even on the odd chance that everyone else in the room concurs with the good and the change you or I intend, they're likely already seeing the same goal from different vantage points. Or different priorities of pacing and timing. Or even more subtle differences - shades and gradations - of desired effect. 

Now of course, to get the project up and running there is rarely need for absolute and total agreement. The devil rather lies farther down the road, in what we call the details, or the execution. Disagreement is usually acceptable up to a certain point. But sooner or later (Action being the Emperor, or rather Dictator, that he is), sooner or later a majority in the room - or even I myself - will need to get on that famous "same page," or with that proverbial same program. Or so we may need at very least, in order for the change to proceed in an orderly and constructive fashion. And that's not always an easy thing to do. The transparently obvious good of my - or your - chosen method, or sequence, or timetable may be not nearly as obvious to others on the team as it is to us. So what do we do? One recourse is to try to negotiate without falling into excessive compromise - that ever-elusive tipping point. Sometimes various degrees of persuasion, or even pressure, may seem to be required. At the same time we don't want to rush to moral conclusions about our differences of opinion, at least for the moment; we continue, if we are sensible, to regard each other as well-intentioned individuals acting in good faith. Well and good. For now. Meanwhile, what about the rest of creation?

My point is that certain consequences arise, when we view the rest of the universe as morally foreign to us. Or morally opaque and unintelligible. Or as merely a hostile wilderness that we humans must morally and productively subdue. It's true that you and I now have a common endeavor. Or even, if you must, a common enemy. But that doesn't mean we will automatically see each other as natural allies. Or that our areas of common interest will be at once transparent and immediate to everyone. Or that the process of negotiating towards a common goal, even with the best of everyone's intentions, will get easier with time. Indeed, sometimes Time itself can seem to be the enemy. All sorts of things can come up, and get in the way of the best-laid plans. And even the most sound-proof, germ-proof laboratory - or conference room - isn't exactly sealed off from nature, from unpredictability, from life. 

Now of course this latter realization, on our part, too often only redoubles our efforts to make our work all the more air- and watertight, to seal "life" off from the "outside." The problem is that the more we do so, the more certain other unexpected guests are likely to crash our party. Everything from the failure of the heating system, to a sudden life crisis interrupting the schedule of a team-member whose absences have already been piling up. And so from seemingly out of nowhere, and often in the blink of an eye, we can find ourselves enmeshed in practical and procedural questions whose difficulty, and stubbornness, we never dreamed of at the start. Questions, and resultant differences of opinion, that can make even close associates seem less like partners than like parts of the problem, or obstacles to the solution. And that too, it seems to me, is how we humans - singly and collectively - can come to view ever larger numbers of people as, well, more or less tools. Or impediments, of one kind or another. Or incidental parts of the scenery, that we should be able to move about at will. It is how, I believe, we may often come to regard increasing numbers of people, whom we may otherwise love or esteem or tolerate, as either instrumental, or irrelevant, or detrimental, or hostile, to the good things we plan to do. With nothing much at all left in between those 4 iron categories, or beyond them: nothing of that deliciously God-designed, quirky, irreducible, unabstractable humanity that, as we all know in our moments of sanity, is worth so much more than the most expert execution of our highest human aims. That same human nature, mind you, which is capable of such extraordinary works: difficult, and subtle, delicate, and even delicately discerning and understanding works. Or so at least it may be, given a properly patient understanding of how that nature itself works, and what it needs. Not to mention a properly humble understanding of the God who made it. And even - dare we hope? - a lowly willingness to know ourselves, even as we are known. But now imagine it: all this fecundity, and present, or rather imprisoned, in each of one of us! Even as it remains so damnably hard for you or me to control. 

So what is it, do you suppose, that makes us begin so many of our most ambitious and constructive works, sure of nothing other than the goodness of Man, and of the works and the will of Man? And yet as we go along, growing less and less sure of anything except the goodness of Me?

As We Try the Patience of a Prince

I

I think I read somewhere once that patience - at least in human affairs - is inseparable from sensitivity to another's limitations. For instance, we may be tempted, and for reasons that seem altogether "legitimate," to drive someone else to move at a pace that may be wholly foreign to their nature. Or else inconsistent with their present level of energy or alertness (suppose, say, that they just got up). And so we hold back. We refrain from pressing them, or at least not too hard. We take care not to demand from them the "utmost" that we "know" them to be capable of.* Above all, we don't blithely assume there are no limits to how far we can go with certain other people, or to what we can, or should, get out of them. 

*As if, really, that were a thing one could know, or that could be measured and quantified. 

But if this modest virtue is inseparable from any sound definition of patience, then surely no one has been more patient with me than God. No intelligent being has been more forebearing of my halting, snail's pace, hopefully not non-existent rate of spiritual progress these past 10 years: my dismal attempts at fasting and abstinence and mortification. And worst of all during this present season of Advent: one in which, I'm told, we do well to look forward, not just festively, but penitentially - and soberly - to a second coming of the Prince of Peace very different from His first. 

But if He's been so all-but-absurdly patient with me, then how much more so, I wonder, with those who are far more "deserving" - or at very least, making far better use of the grace He extends to them. Let me consider, then, with utmost gravity how others' prayers are sustaining me well beyond any tiniest merit of my own. How these "little ones" are no slight part of the patience of God, but are indeed His continous, overflowing vessels and channels. And not just to me, of course, but to the whole world. Speaking of which - one might contend - let's not forget our Father's arguably vastly greater patience with the "undeserving" world at large. And how often, on our side, that patience is ignored, taken for granted, despised.

II

But now let's try approaching the whole question from a rather different standpoint. Let us suppose that some among us, in their wise human conceits, were to determine that such Divine patience is in fact wasted on such an undeserving world. That we have much too kind a creator-God. That He is far too considerate of our slowness and frailty; far too delicate towards our unreadiness to be goaded on to the race's proper excellence and perfection; above all, that He's far too little confident, and optimistic, of our capacity to be driven/expedited/accelerated to that ever-imperative "next level."

In any case (as some more globally courageous souls than I might argue), what a relief that the rulers of this present world are nothing like Him. Thank "God" that they're either: 

(1) far less patient with our poor human clay; or else 

(2) possessed of far greater faith in our power to transcend/transgress our human limits. 

Or, beyond all this, might it be they've convinced themselves that this boundless faith (optimism?) of theirs, in both our and their own limitless endurance/resilience, is just what the Doctor ordered? I.e., it is precisely the sort of strength best able to prepare our world for the entrance of a species of god to whom I've alluded before: one whose paramount virtue - and all that he respects, apparently - is strength. And not just any strength, but in particular a kind most clearly expressed by what most of us would experience as exasperation, and harshness. And impatience. And, of course, the fact that we masses experience "real strength" as these things is yet further proof of our ignorance, weakness and unfitness. And all because he, and they, are incomparably better judges of what we poor masses can handle, absorb, adapt to, than we ourselves could ever be. Including those labyrinthine wars round the globe that we peons seem to be finding more and more irksome and pointless, but which our betters know to be necessary.

You don't believe me? Why, look around you. Anywhere. Observe what a world of - not just "strongmen" (whatever that means) - but WAR ⁴LORDS we live in. All our Putins, Zelenskyys, Erdogans, Khameneis, Netanyahus, Sinwars, Macrons, Starmers, van der Leyens, Kagans, etc, who - whatever the merits or justice of their original position/grievance/crusade - insist on pressing either their own populations, or else some carefully chosen proxy-nation, ever deeper into the labyrinth of war. As if their own peoples and closest allies had, or were supposed to have, a limitless tolerance for military conflict. And not just for the hardships and uncertainties of war, but for its volatilities, atrocities, traumas, horrors. To say  nothing of runaway debt, rampant inflation, and an ongoing, razor's-edge proximity to the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation.

III

And why NOT? one may ask. After all, as Lady Gaga and others of comparable wisdom have attested,      "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

And yes, I'm aware that the normal human being can be a creature of extraordinary, maybe even superhuman resilience. And in the face, it may be argued, of every kind and degree of discouragement, degradation, atrocity, horror. Including, again, those of war, along with its most zealously uncompromising war lords.

But now picture for a moment a creature, and a person, at once so primally and extendedly helpless as the human. One who is from birth so radically unknowing and trusting, so utterly dependent upon environment, care, cultivation, dare we say nurturance? And now further imagine that one of such exquisite fragility and complexity can only be improved, as it were, by being brutally simplified and "streamlined". Imagine that it isn't just hardened and annealed, but actually made stronger, and even wiser, by trauma: by being bathed, from its youngest age, in all manner of shock and terror and horror; by being submerged, in short, in everything most destructive of what most of us would call innocence. 

To argue such a point isn't merely to trust in the social usefulness of cruelty: it is to raise most forms of cruelty into a sort of supreme and transcendent kindness. And yes, within the terms of its logic it does make a certain sense. A fundamentally hostile universe, we might presume, is one in which only the most reciprocally hostile intelligent species has much chance at survival. And what better way of withstanding and overcoming the world's cruelty than by learning and studying how to be cruel to one's own self, and to one's own kind? Especially when you consider that the testing is bound to come sooner or later. Better to start now and control the process, then to encounter it down the road and be unprepared. Indeed, suppose there's NO horror that - regardless of one's age - any human worthy of survival can not just survive, but fully rebound from, and even be strengthened by. Given that premise, it might well be asked: Can temptation, can testing ever start too early? And on a larger scale - and in the teeth of a radically adversarial universe - can any species ever be too hardened, too callused, too inured: in a word, too strong?

And yet there remains, I believe, something even the strongest among us fears. On the most elementary level, my best hunch is that the strong man's worst nightmare is the reaching of the limits of his own strength. Or worse yet, discovering beyond any shadow of doubt the insufficiency of that strength. Or maybe even its hollowness, and emptiness. After all, isn't the whole point and reward of being strong - and of progressively enlarging and extending one's strength, power, influence, etc - that one doesn't need to acknowledge limits of any kind? And so might it be argued that the ultimate human discouragement, and disappointment, lies in the discovery that there is any human limit we can't surmount?

IV

Shall I tell you, then, what I suspect our Great Global World today is most afraid of?

What that world most fears is the real nature of everything we are, and the real nature of everything we do. It is terrified that either of these things should be revealed in their true predicament - i.e., their real nakedness and poverty, and helplessness before God, and apart from God. Because then that Great World itself would also be revealed both in all its appalling uselessness (that most damnable of all modern sins) and in all its desperate, unassuageable need for God. 

And of course, what is true of the World is indelibly true of each one of us, from the least to the very greatest. Even among the World's most obdurately, prosperously wicked "great and good," there abides this need. I will go further than this. Even in the most evil of people, in the most (self-)imprisoned souls, and at back of the wickedest acts, there is a kind of transparency of need and lack, of simplicity, of orphanedness and homesickness, whenever these souls are brought into relation with God. And, of course, whenever God is brought into the heart of them.

My point is that we humans are creatures of need - creatures of whom need is our very essence - LONG before we are either creators possessing rights, or producers having duties. Upon this simple truth  - that we depend, and that we receive, long before we can either do or plan or arrange, create or produce - upon this hangs everything that makes us distinctly human, and that makes distinct the human things we do. In other words, in our human needfulness for God is contained:

1) everything that distinguishes us from both angels and animals (who do not "need" or "depend on" their Maker in anything like the way we do); 

2) the entire quality and validity of all our works, whether paid or unpaid. 

Not everything about our works, of course. Not everything that's proud and shallow, or cruel and empty. But rather, whatever in them is deep: whatever is storied and layered and rich, whatever is humble, whatever is kind and loving and true. Both in all that we humans create and, yes (if you can imagine it), in all that we produce.

At the same time, if that's not something most apt to strike terror in the heart of our Great Global World, I don't know what is.

Indeed, if I may venture to say so, I think it does well to be afraid. Because after all, if there is anything less equipped to prepare this World for the return of a Prince of Peace - whether to make good use of His long-suffering patience, or to endure His yet more long-suffering justice - surely it's the ungraced human "strength," the productivity, the all-sufficiency we've been laboring to acquire these past 30 years?

A Near-Useless Greatness

It took me an awfully long time to figure this out. Maybe longer than most who've duly applied themselves to the question. But here is what I've concluded:

This world is not a boring place. Not in itself. But it can all too easily seem boring when we look at it - as we often look at other people - solely for what we can get out of it. When we see it as something created primarily for ourselves; or worse yet, for those we most admire or want to be like. All those "cool and smart people," etc. Or, worst of all, when we see the world as something that chiefly we ourselves, and other cool people like us, have created. With little or no input even from God.

But that's not the world's fault. Indeed the Creation itself is so cram-packed with so many things full of wonder, and absorbing interest, and sometimes even delight, that even its dullest creatures - those things that seem to us most merely "what they are," or "what they do", and nothing else -  even these can surprise us. Even these can somehow manage to exceed and escape our attempts to functionalize them: to make them dull and predictable and serviceable. Or so they may, at least, when we push them too far? - too far beyond their natures, and the laws and limits of their natures? Anything in nature - and that includes our human nature - anything in our physical world when pushed too far can spring, or snap back. With the consequences becoming at times not just inconvenient, but violent or even ugly. Like, for instance, the Great American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Or even (some might argue) the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. But also, just conceivably?, in ways that a certain perennially popular genre of science fiction - everything from Hitchcock's The Birds to The Walking Dead? - never tires of reminding us.

In sum, there is no creature in this universe so merely useful as to be reducible to its mere utility. Not even birds. But least of all ourselves, and each other. Indeed, it is just those things in you and me which are most "irreducible" - which are most indelibly "ourselves," as it were (and yet often seem most useless) - that are the seedbed of everything good that lies "beyond" them. I.e., it is precisely these elements - most often encompassed under the terms "soul" or "spirit" - that, when heedfully discerned,  cultivated, encouraged, can become the  groundwork of all those other, "practical" things about us, that make the world sit up and take notice. Which is to say, all those skills and talents that make us useful in the best, completest sense of the word, because they make even busy, important, sensible people actually need us, and depend on us. As opposed to regarding us as so much raw material that may be infinitely serviceable, but is also infinitely downgradeable and disposable. The lesson here is that every human soul is not just a thing beyond price; it is, as designed by its Maker, far too efficient a thing for any of us to presume we can afford to dispense with it. Or use it up. Or worst of all, like Mick Jagger's Lucifer, "lay [it] to waste."

My point is that no God-designed creature is so dysfunctional as to be either without use, or else nothing more than what can be reduced to its various uses. So, yes, even the Devil, that great waster, has his uses. And yet even he - so far as he is still God's creature and not his own - remains more than any of them. (Which also implies that the converse is true: To the extent that he has become "his own god," he is not just "reducible" to his uses, but is much less than any of them. But more on that in my final paragraph.)

So what might be one utility* of Satan for the patient, heedful Christian?

*If that is not too presumptuous a word for One whose cosmic authority and eminence remain very real.

He is, may I suggest, a reminder to us that there are, in this universe, creatures of super-extraordinary intelligence, and rationality, and insight, not to mention power - power to calculate and predict and persuade, to dominate and control. Creatures so supreme, in a word, that if we could see them as their Maker first intended them to be, we might easily be tempted to regard them as no creatures at all, but rather as some species of deity. Even to the point of bowing down and worshiping them, and yielding our lives to them. What prevents us, by God's grace, is when we see the fallen angels clearly for what they have since become - or rather have made themselves - in the naked glare of Divine judgment: beings utterly hateful, both to themselves and to us. 

Yet here is a paradox. What makes demons hateful to us is not that they intended to be so, at least not at the outset. No matter how much they hate us, they had every intention of being esteemed and worshiped and adored, even by humans. Rather are they an example of what can happen to any created being, even the highest seraph, when it becomes obsessed with how it can use, with what it can make of any thing - even itself - to the neglect of what that creature merely is. Because what any thing "merely is" *(as distinct even from what it thinks of itself) is always more inexhaustibly interesting - more pregnant with symbol and mystery, with story and meaning and love beyond its own powers - than anything you or I could ever make of it. 

So why do we often behave as though matters were just the opposite? Why do we too often presume, whether consciously or otherwise, that things - and even people - only become more interesting in the degree that we "monkey with" or manipulate them? 

The problem is that seeing what any thing "merely is" is no easy task. To see any creature for itself - both its inestimable value and its innumerable uses - presupposes something very different from the kinds of human company we're most used to in a busy, hands-on, workaday world. What is  required, rather, is a presence so lowly, and quiet, and "ear-to-the-ground", so preternaturally heedful and hands-off, that it can only be Divine. In other words, to see any thing clearly demands much more than any such talent, or ingenuity, as even the most gifted fallen angel could supply. Even more than an active, probing, dissecting intellect, it requires that almost animally patient, yielding, trustful, and teachable thing we call wisdom. 

With Lucifer, then, may I suggest that we have a kind of ultimate test case, or object lesson, in what happens when any created thing becomes so supremely, commandingly intelligent, and so conscious of its intelligence, as to leave no room and no use for wisdom. But in particular, I think, for the sort of "omni-sensitive," omni-appreciative wisdom which is closest to the heart of God. And that is best secured by, if not inseparable from, humility.

My point is that even the most supremely gifted seraph can reach a dead end. And he never does so more totally than when he becomes so obsessed with the use and the self-making of anything - including himself - as to make himself all but totally useless.

(And once again, pray for the peace of Kyiv. And in particular, pray and fast for the pending peace talks between Trump and Putin. Granted, you may hate them both absolutely. But ask yourself: Are you absolutely sure you can afford to have things to get even worse?)

Towards a More Living Word

As we all know - at least when we think and pray about it - all human words have immense power in relation to the things they designate. Including those creatures they describe, or despise; listen to, or lord over. So perhaps it would be truer to say that our words have many, and divers, powers. And even opposite powers. It may, for instance, be a power to enhance a creature's being or life - as if the thing in question had somehow become (to the heedful reader or listener), not just more vivid, more alive than before, but more grateful for and delighting in being alive. It may be a power to stifle and and stultify, to deride and mock and minimize, so that the thing becomes almost ashamed of being here, or of being what it is. Or it may be a power so draining of life, so bland and neutralizing and attenuating, it's as if the thing barely had any importance or even existence at all. Or certainly none apart from our proactive utilities and agendas. 

No surprise, then, if our Twenty-first Century conception of our uses of words, and of their uses of things, tends towards the harshly functional. Or even the rigidly hierarchical. No wonder that we expect and regard it as our right to command our words, as if we ourselves had just invented them; as if they had no intrinsic or ancient life of their own, seeded and nursed and cultured over countless generations; or that we expect our words to command our things as if they had no intrinsic or primordial, in short, no prehuman life at all. And so it's hardly surprising, that we hypermoderns should think of our words as largely arbitrary in their relation to the things they designate. And expect them to be, as it were, not in the least ashamed or embarrassed by this bold, untethered power of arbitration. But if anything that much prouder towards, that much more defiant of the things they presume to define.

Yet even now, I don't think that's the whole story. How many of us, I wonder, if we could for once be honest with our own emotions, would deny that we have at times experienced words that are very different. Words so alive to, so imbued with, so dyed in the presence of the things they describe, that the latter seemed somehow less complete - or in any case far less vivid - apart from these words' company, and companionship. Almost as if these same things had somehow lost tongues we never knew they possessed. And yet there we were, glad and relieved beyond words at their having found those tongues and those voices again. 

So much, then, for the things our words describe. But now imagine on the other side, if you can, words - not of the "take-charge" kind - but rather of a kind so humble, and humbly devoted to the things of which they've been given charge, they're almost like poor shriveled orphans without them. And yet still so much the richer, the more savory and intoxicating for that parentage, and that dependence. And not just the most carefully chosen words of, say, Shakespeare, or Keats, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or Walter de la Mare.

God help us, then, when we become so unable to enjoy the living flow of words, that we become more and more unable to discern, and delight in, the living flow of things. God help us, in short, when poetry ceases to speak to us at all. Not even, say, as a minor hindrance, or encumbrance, to words and sentences we might otherwise easily grasp. Yes, even where we find that poetry seemingly buried in prose (in whose folds its most resonant nuggets are so often tucked away).

Nor is it just convention-driven dullness that can blind us to the livingness of both words and things. What may often stanch and dry up this flow of our words is our attempts to channel and constrict, not just our writing, or our actions, but even things themselves into certain supposedly guaranteed outcomes. Which are of course assumed to be utterly good for them. Almost as if these things - and people - had no purpose or meaning, or even right to exist (any more than our words and actions have any right to exist), apart from the fixed place they occupy in our most desired results.

As an example, consider someone in your life who, however much you may be in denial of the fact, has no more ultimate value to you than a successfully moved chesspiece. Imagine a woman whom you think you love more than anything in the world, and so presumably would do almost anything for. Except that, in fact, your real interest in her extends no farther than her becoming, say, your wife or mistress, or girlfriend, or other instrument of your pleasure, or ornament to your success. And now repeat the same exercise, as applicable, with the ideal man or even pet of your choice. Notice your preoccupation in each case with use, and functionality, and ornamentality. As if everything good that happens in the world were somehow a matter of the right control. And in particular, of your right to control.

And so God save us, too, from becoming so enclosed in the bubbles of our own anxieties and agendas, our own ambitions and frustrations, that we could hardly recognize real surprise, real wonder, real miracle, if it surrounded us on every side. Or, if you'd like to vary the metaphor, God deliver us from being so intent on, so bound to the internal track of our mission, our martyrdom, that we become oblivious to external movements of any kind. Even those of nature, even those of God. Above all, God save us from becoming so fortressed in the grandeur of our own misery that we couldn't discern real need if it knocked on our kitchen-doors. Including the needs, and secret desires, of those we profess (often most vehemently) to love.

But not just the needs of others, I want to say: maybe even more so our own? But especially, I think, those most secret needs of all, that dwell in the remotest deeps of you and me, and in their most forgotten, Eden-haunted recesses. Those primordial needs which often, in their very humility, have the strangest way of proving, not just of more absorbing interest, but far more full of wonder and delight, than all our most exalted ambitions, or all our most visionary dreams.

Those needs, in short, which best embody all the things we humans have ever anciently desired. Or indeed, could ever want. At least, so far as we actually let God meet them.

What the Unworldly Need Now

I'll admit, since the breakup of my friend's marriage, I haven't stopped probing the supposedly immutable dynamics of male-female relationships in our time. And worst of it, all my efforts accompanied by the dubious blessings, wisdom and counsel of YouTube. Talk about absorbing far more heat than light. 

What most disturbs me is what seems to be the entire ethos of the current dating market. And in particular, how demands for a certain narrow and ungenerous - if not un-Christian - kind of perfection have never been more strident. Especially in determining criteria for one's choice of life-partners. Or even bed-partners. As if each one of us, male and female and everything purportedly in between, were now free as ever before (or rather, obliged as never before), not just to have it all, but to be it all. Imagine feeling obliged to be everything that a certain graphic-comic sensibility says you are capable of being. Including a good many things that - as expectations continue to rise - very likely you're NOT capable of being. Like, say, some darker, edgier, quasi-vampiric Marvel superhero. Everything except, of course, for being yourself. Let alone anything warmly and companionably (much less compassionately) human.

In short, it never fails to amaze me the creatures we make ourselves to be, in order to be attractively, desirably strong. As if we were acting on the premise that the most inexcusable quality - or at any rate the biggest turn-off - in any human being was vulnerability. Think of the superhumans - if not pagan demigods? - we pose as, and the postures we maintain! And all for the sake of projecting a certain air: an air of power and control, of dauntingness and intimidatingness, of steely self-composure and unstoppable will. Plus a host of kindred traits that might best be summarized by that venerable American word (and tradition) we call "coolness." 

So just what is it, do you suppose, that drives us to pretend that this set of "strengths" - so vital, supposedly, in dating-partners - is somehow going to equip them for lifelong marriage? Or even marriage of a decade or two? Much less the rearing of children? "Oh, but he'll (she'll) change eventually. He's got to." Really? And just how can we be sure of switching gears - whether our own or our spouse's? And with the right measure? And the right timing? And what if, even then, we somehow find ourselves totally "turned off" by the end product?

That's surely the central problem with what passes for courtship these days. We make ourselves so short-term enticing, and so long-term unendurable, not only is it a miracle anyone should want to see us day in day out, much less live with us: it's almost the height of presumption, on our part, to expect that they should want to.

And yes, I know marriage has often been described as the triumph of hope over experience. I just never thought I'd see the day when it would become something more like the triumph of self-importance, and baseless vanity, over any rational hope.

And think of it: All because two people, in the courtship and formative years of their marital project, had succeeded in something at which all of us, always, should be only too happy to fail. They had succeeded in making themselves, and maybe even each other?, so formidably, dauntingly attractive - they had, between the two of them, created such a surplus of dramatic tension, and CONtention - that any "cooling off" period, any relaxing into a routine normality of life was all but sure to prove the most insipid anticlimax. Not, mind you, that even the most savagely attracted couples have any choice but to relax, or be domesticated, sooner or later. For who can live at fever-pitch levels of "romantic" tension all the time?

So what do people - even marriage- and dating-partners - most urgently need from each other? And today more than ever? I would begin by saying they need permission to be themselves. And in particular those aspects of themselves that they're least sure of. Or maybe even - for a variety of complicated and largely unreasonable reasons - least proud of. In short, they need permission to be themselves in their entirety. And not just to the extent that they're "self-confident": i.e., NOT just insofar as they stand up for, and assert, and exert, and even impose themselves upon others, and against others. As if this latter Self were somehow the only kind worth having. Or worth respecting and cultivating. By anyone. Especially when you consider that it is precisely this arrogance in us - precisely this Self whose weight we most like to "throw around" - which is the most unnatural, most de-Edenized, most un-souled part of us: the part that bears not most, but least resemblance to the creature we were created by God. Or rather (and to put it, I think, still more Scripturally), it is that side of us which is most ashamed, not of having sinned, but of having any regrets at having sinned. And so is least humbled by what others (or, indeed, any rational outside observer) would call its mistakes. Including some very ancient, and ancestral mistakes. If not primordial ones. Like eating a certain forbidden fruit, for instance. It is, in a word, that most radically corrupted Self in us which feels most justified, most emboldened, not only not to look back, not to regret that we were once expelled from a certain paradise. It feels even prouder - to say nothing of relieved - at having lost all hope of that garden's intimacy, its delight, its peace, ever being restored.

Which peace, if I remember correctly, was once shattered by a man and a woman, and at the very genesis of their building a life together. And of course (as no less a moral exemplar than Lady Macbeth would remind us), what's done cannot be undone. Still I can't help wondering: If we their children go on refusing to draw hope from the full memory of our origins - yes, even unto the garden we've lost - just how are we ever supposed to give hope to the children we cultivate?