A Mid-Christmas Nonmeditation

Ever notice how we humans don’t take any too warmly to reminders of our own finitude, as distinct from other people’s? 

No doubt nearly all of us - in one degree or another, at some point or phase of our lives - have assumed  ourselves to be either immortal, or invincible, or indestructible. And even though most of us can pretty easily imagine some really bad things happening to us, that doesn’t mean we find it easy to identify with those people in our lives (near or distant) in whom the bad things are most visibly embodied. Homeless individuals, for instance. Or even those suffering the effects of a recent foreclosure. 

Which in turn makes me wonder: Since when does any conscious margin of superiority, or advantage, that I believe myself to hold over you – be it “permanent” or temporary or even imaginary - better equip me to be of actual use or service to you? Does even the shrewdest, most efficient, most dedicated merchant do a better job of serving her customers by not identifying with them? By looking down on them? By knowing – or pretending to know – nothing of what it feels like to be patronized, hoodwinked, strung along, sold a bill of goods? And if the maker of all things could see the point, not just of knowing Divinely but of living humanly our miseries – our stink and blood and excrement and humiliation and cruelty – really, who are we to presume to be any better? Or safer?

Do you know what is the very worst way of ministering to, or consoling, or encouraging, somebody who’s facing death? Old age? Debilitating illness? Poverty? (Believe me, I've done it times past counting.) It is to make an unbridgeable gulf of the differences between yourself and that human creature, and between your prospects and hers. It is to behave – however  unconsciously – as if those things either will not, or could not, ever happen to you.  

A Poem

I had a dove and the sweet dove died; 
And I have thought it died of grieving: 
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, 
With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving; 
Sweet little red feet! why should you die - 
Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why? 
You liv'd alone in the forest-tree, 
Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me? 
I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas; 
Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees? 

- John Keats (1795-1821) 

I want you to notice two things about this poem. First, its all-consuming tenderness. Second, its staunchly (albeit inadvertently) uncompromising realism. So far as I can tell, the narrator had no intention other than to describe exactly what he did, and exactly how he felt. Yet observe how unintended were the results.

I find the effect breathtakingly realistic. We all know how easily, sometimes, what imagines itself to be kindness can turn out to be the reverse: a "care" that's clumsy, confining, even unintendedly stifling of the creature we profess to love. Worst of all, it's the kind of thing that can happen in the most exasperating of moments: even, for instance, when we're doing our best to create what we hope and pray will be a kind of perfect environment, an atmosphere containing the utmost assurance of our care and affection.

So now let's suppose for a moment that human kindness to a mere bird could be something every bit as "cruel," so to speak, as the result described in this poem. Something so estranging from its peculiar paradise;  so exiling, in fact, from everything it calls home. As we all well know it can. Or at least we do in our moments of imagination and poetry, and sanity. But in that case, how much more cruel, I wonder, are those cruelties we humans inflict on each other that we know to be cruel, and yet persist in believing will issue in kindness? I don't mean just those blunders we very discreetly confine to our private homes or private lives. I mean certain very acceptable presumptions that enter into the most visible paths of our public life. Even, every once in a while, into those paths that we positively know - I mean, we're so sure we can practically taste it - will lead to greater profit, greater proficiency, greater progress. My question: If a mere bird's natural paradise be such, that no amount of human tinkering or fretting, worrying or interfering can add to (though it may well subtract from) its stature one inch, then how much more man-impervious, how much more God-dependent, is our paradise? How much more will He clothe us little ones, even despite our little faith?

"It's not that SIMPLE!" you rebuke me roundly and soundly. Fair enough. Certainly if we're to believe our modern dogmas, we humans thrive on limitless complexity; we can never get deep enough into the rat race (no doubt that's why so many Americans dream of endless wealth and early retirement). But what if our wisest modernity is wrong? What if our own Divinely human, lost yet lingering Eden be a place (of body and mind) both immeasurably richer, and unsearchably more complex - and yet simpler - than the simplest yearning of the most irretrievably urbanized pigeon?

I'm not saying we shall have nothing human to do, nothing of our own to contribute - even to those fragments or echoes of Eden yet residual to us in this life. What I'm suggesting, rather, is that even our most strenuous contributions will in no wise conform to our present notions and experiences of strain. What I envision is a kind of "work" so Divinely-natured, as it were - so Word-attuned, and Word-attentive, to the pleasures of even the simplest of that Eden's inhabitants - as to contain in it nothing whatever of a certain Grimness we all know well, having been on both its giving and receiving ends. Nothing whatever of that grimly anxious self-importance which, so often in this present life, makes our attempts at love so heavy and toilsome and tyrannical, both to ourselves and to others. In short, nothing of fret and fuss, of busybodied interference and manipulation.

Of course our own proper Eden may also be technological. In places the City may even seem, by our present puny notions, to be hypertechnological. Yet for all that, I can also imagine it being saturated throughout with a kind of once-and-future, primordially innocent simplicity. One that manages somehow, like the mustard-tree of the parable, to give hospice to living creatures of all sorts. Or even - by some Divine-human feat which for now we can only describe as miracle - to every kind of living thing? Yet without squeezing or straining any of  them (any more than we ourselves would want to be squeezed or strained). A simplicity that would, if anything, be far more trustful, far more childlike, than any such state as known to our first parents. And yet, perhaps for that very reason, all the more exquisitely molded to our original human clay and nature and calling. In short, all the more befittingly characteristic of that Adam who is both once and future: that one greatest, and yet most closely, most intimately God-dependent (Genesis 2:7), of all the visible earthly creatures of God.

How the "Real" (i.e., more or less Godless) World Works

In keeping with what I take to be the Spirit of the Moment, I thought I'd take a moment to share a few thoughts on the subject of protests. Or, more specifically, protest slogans. I notice that two questions keep popping up, within the limited space inside my skull, whenever I come across a really familiar slogan of protest. One like, for instance, "War is not the answer."

The first question I would address to the protestor is the following:
"Exactly who, and how broad or narrow, is your intended audience?"

The second:
"Assuming your message could have its most desired immediate effect, what sort of rejoinder or other response from that audience would best assure you that your point had been understood and well-considered?"

Now I suppose from the standpoint of Heaven there is such a thing as an ideal audience: People who are uniquely best-placed and best-suited to hear a message, either (1) because they'd find it not only utterly convicting, but convicting to such a degree as to inspire immediate and effective action; or else (2) because they were best able to furnish solid, well-grounded reasons why the message was either beside the point, or wholly unable to convict anybody of anything.

I have only the vaguest notion of what that ideal audience might look like which most deserves to hear and be convicted by the message "War is not the answer" (for all I know it may be most expressly identified by a look in the mirror). But whoever these folks might be, I get the funniest feeling that their most uninhibitedly truthful answer (given sufficient help from alcohol, caffeine, hypnosis or other uninhibitors) might run something like this:

"I got news for you: Peace was never even part of the question." 

One Thanklessly Productive Generation

One of the many things I am - or ought to be - thankful for:

That our US holiday of Thanksgiving hasn't (yet?) been moved to Sunday or Monday, the better to accommodate our global work, money and stock-trading schedules. (Don't give 'em ideas, right?)

No doubt I'm being way too curmudgeonly for a festive occasion, but stranger things have happened. Certainly our own glorious Age is no stranger to strangeness. In fact, I'd be amazed if any industrial era since 1914 has been more zealous to facilitate the global flow of all things busy - work, trade, money, influence, POWER - than these past sixteen-odd years. Anyhow, we sure have been bustling along. With, in some quarters, hardly so much as a pause for regret through that bitter fall-winter-spring of '08-'09. Ah, but then who among even our wildest optimists could have dreamed that, by 24 November 2011, we'd have so much to show for it all?

It's beginning to dawn on me that the serious, hell-for-leather pursuit of productivity is, in its upshot, not all that different from our other famous American pursuit, that of happiness. In other words, the more we pursue productivity - the more we press and strain and lunge and snarl and claw for it - the more the mercurial Beast eludes us. Until one day it finally tires of the whole ridiculous sport, and turns and snarls back. And then - ever so quietly and resolutely - it starts to hunt us.

Make ME the Channel of Your Peace

Is it just my wishful thinking?

Or is there more than a hint of family resemblance between St Francis of Assisi and the Lord God of the first few chapters of Genesis? Walk closely through Genesis 2: 8-15. Here we are, amidst all the surely violent terrors and horrors of that very first wilderness of Creation - Tennyson's famous "Nature red in tooth and claw" (or so we've since learned in our evolutionary wisdom; no doubt the ancient Hebrews were faith-blinded to the nastier side of Mother Nature). And, imagine! - not yet a working human soul to add Locke's productive labor and value to the otherwise profitless scene.

So what does God do? He goes and plants a garden.

Why We're Still So Miserable (with no end in sight)

The world today is awash in religion. But is it any closer to God?

The question is not as presumptuous as it might sound at first to many Christians ("Gasp! How can the world ever be close to God?"). To be sure, the world in and of itself is very likely incapable of ever getting closer to God. But that doesn't mean we should welcome the prospect of its drifting ever farther away. "Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light." (Amos 5: 18 - KJV)

My point is that none of us really likes looking at something hideous, even when that thing is just "being itself," or acting according to its nature. It may be the intrinsic nature of that thing we call "the world" to make itself more and more repulsive, even as it strives more and more to separate itself from the beauty of God. But the fact that this is the nature - or natural bent? - of the world doesn't mean we have to like it that way. Or even that we will like it, bad as we ourselves may otherwise be. Man without God - and isn't that, after all, what most of us Christians mean when we talk about "the world"? - Man without God has never been a pretty picture to look at. Not even to those who think he's better off without God. For instance, I've yet to read of many atheists (apart from the really dogmatic Marxists) who actually enjoyed visiting or reading about the glories of that supreme atheists' utopia, Maoist China. Indeed, I wonder if many of them weren't frankly bored or even revolted by the spectacle. Which, if true, should come as a surprise to no one. It is only as Man steps "out from behind" God - or worse yet, starts seriously thinking that God is behind him - that he begins to look naked and ugly, sore-ridden and pestilent.

Of course we may think we have every good reason to step "out from behind" God. We may think of our Maker as bad, or primitive, or unreasonable, or unjust, or tyrannical. But even then, how often do we become better than He is by trying to move away from Him? Notice how it is precisely those most eager to throw aside, or strip away, some yoke they perceive as tyrannical - be it Divine or human, Godly or governmental - who so often end up becoming the worst, most hellish tyrants of all. (What was it Orwell said? "All animals are equal, but some . . . ")

No doubt everything that is exists for a reason. Even Hell. Indeed, what is any human tyranny if not a kind of anticipatory hell? If I may paraphrase Voltaire: If Hell were not subterrestrial, man in his ceaseless ingenuity would have found a way of making it terrestrial. And I do mean that. I don't believe we humans have ever been very good at accepting the really easy way out - much less making it easier for any of our neighbors. And least of all when that same Way has been God-provided.

I know it probably seems just the opposite today, what with all our hyperpoliticized Religion-on-Steroids. But the fact that many people talk about Hell (mostly as a place where other people should expect to go) doesn't mean that on the whole we believe in it in quite the ways we used to. For example, suppose it were true that record numbers of people today - as contrasted with, say, the previous three or four generations - believed that the single most important thing in their lives was where they were going to go after they die. And maybe that is the case today, especially in our unabashedly religious America. But if that's so, then perhaps you can tell me: Why do so many of us live - yes, even here in America - as if the most important part of life were how much we leave behind us when we go? Or even as if how much we've accumulated - goods, honors, profits, etc - will determine our precise elevation in the place where we go?

We forget that there are many ways of disbelieving in Hell, or discounting its relevance. Or indeed the relevance of any place or life beyond death. One of the most popular is to try to prolongue your conscious physical existence by any and every means possible here on earth. Another, already mentioned just now, is to try to leave as many things as possible behind you on earth (marks? legacies?). Remember - as our glorious Early Twenty-first Century never fails to remind us - you are what you acquire. And how much more what you pass on? (Cf. Psalm 49 passim for an alternative view.)

Certainly Man wouldn't be the first creature of God who, in finding his Creator to be a tyrant, a suppressor of legitimate ambition, or even a devil, only succeeded in becoming his own devil, tyrant, etc. Maybe that's why it so often happens that, the more reluctant we are to believe that Hell is "down there," the more successful we become in bringing it up here.

American Wisdom

Arrogance and stupidity: Two words that, in modern American political discourse, seldom if ever occur together in the same sentence. Unless, of course, as direct antitheses.