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?