Old friends

"Old friends, old friends sat on their park bench like bookends." Simon & Garfunkel

Spectator: The more reading they have done the greater the distance between them, the less likely they will ever meet again.  What frame will they share?  What harmonious thought?  There is no hope for bookend friends.

Bookends: It is true the years separate us.  In distance we grow farther apart, in space the other seems smaller.  When life adds volumes we are drawn away.  But we have a common support, this ancient timber that sustains us, running beneath, touching the two.  Called by many names, Earth, Destiny, Being, and Love. 

Spectator: It is little consolation when two dying patients share the same doctor, or the same sun shines on both enemy and enemy alike.  Let me climb upon this timber and I too will share your "sustaining support" with you, and yet will I continue to mock!

Bookends:  Have you not noticed we face in opposite directions?  Of how little consequence is your mockery!  It is in our nature to be contrary.  But if one falls the other is lost so that even if we are 2000 km apart the one will always be a sign of the other.  This is so even if no observer is present, and so, farewell mocker.

The Spectator vanishes, having neither friends nor companions of any kind.

Out of the whirlwind

As the death toll from the recent tornado in Oklahoma mounts, Facebook and newsfeeds are full of prayers for the victims and their families. Meanwhile insurance companies and emergency services are designating this tragedy as an act of God.  The irony should not be lost on anyone.

On my own Facebook feed brave people of faith have called the event "disorienting" and even a "conundrum." This is an honest assessment.  When others have said "now is not the right time" (when is the right time? - life is full of tragedy) these have said "I don't understand."  This much is in keeping with a somewhat refreshing part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, perhaps we might call it the "Davidic" tradition.  This is a tradition not afraid to ask God the tough questions.  It recognizes both God's omnipotence, his promises, and God's responsibility to his people.  It holds God accountable when disaster strikes and seeks to understand why such things take place.  The "right time" is precisely when the tragedy unfolds. In this there is a certain consistency.  If one truly believes in God and what one learns from the church concerning his fidelity, his power, and his presence, it is a natural reaction to suddenly shout "Hey! What's going on and where are you?"  That more believers don't react this way I think must be explained by years of apologetic teaching most Christians have constantly been exposed to. But as the great Reformed theologian Karl Barth once said, Christian apologetics are fundamentally based on insecurity.  So too, I think, is the reaction "now is not the right time."

Churches are full of unbelievers and the falsely modest. The former only think they should believe but do not, and the latter, while also not believing, act a martyr in their disorientation.  The former are tolerable, the latter are insufferable. 

It is time for honest change. Obviously the old view of God is untenable.  Experience and good sense continue to prove this.  This does not mean the Christian must become an atheist.  It also does not mean aligning oneself with the Davidic stream of tradition. If you're not there already, a shift would only be disingenuous and in the end, unnecessary.  Continually crying out to God with every disaster will only grow wearisome when one achieves the same results.  Plus, doing this because David did it, or Job, does not make it authentic when you do it.  Imitation in such matters is unbecoming of a person of faith.

What view of God should one have?  God is obviously hidden from us, unwilling or unable to fulfill his obligations or answer the prayers of those who call on him.  This God is obscure.  This God is the Hidden God.  I will not say this is the dead God, though in many ways he might as well be.  I will merely say here that he is hidden, as are God's ways.  One should challenge those who say otherwise as hypocrites and deceivers, or at least, wishful thinkers.  They are obviously not interested in the Real, or are plainly deceived.  I recently spoke with a pastor who wondered at the loss of youth from his community.  I did not wonder.  No program or worship service will bring them back or attract more.  People are drawn to authenticity that corresponds with experience and what we know of the world.  Church has always adapted to its cultural surroundings and will continue to do so.  But today a radical change is needed.  People of faith will make it.  Cowards and hypocrites will praise God.

Beyond Gut und Bӧse

“Gut und Bӧse sind die Vorurteile Gottes”, sagte die Schlange.

"Good and evil are God's prejudices," said the Serpent.

L'homme Sauvage

Beneath the veneer of civilization...lies not the barbarian and animal, but the human in us who knows the rightness of birth in gentle surroundings, the necessity of a rich nonhuman environment, play at being animals, the discipline of natural history, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in every individual, aware of the validity of these, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms in modern society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos, decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted by the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or ethereal otherworld religions instead of an ecosophical cosmology. But this means that we have not lost, and can not lose the genuine impulse. It awaits only an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing metaphysics.   Paul Shepard

Deep to deep

Il y a que l'esprit qui sente l'esprit.

Apophasis

The question concerns neither dogmatics nor any articles of faith.  The question is simply, whether God has fled from us or not, and whether we are still able to experience this flight truly and creatively. 

Heidegger, 1937/38.

There was a Boy by Wordsworth

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.—
And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

This boy was taken from his mates, and died
In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.
Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale
Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village-school
And through that churchyard when my way has led
On summer-evenings, I believe that there
A long half-hour together I have stood
Mute—looking at the grave in which he lies!

Terminal Will

Our deeds are simply no first beginning, for in them nothing actually new attains existence: rather, through that which we do, we simply experience what we are.

Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer

The Fisherman by Goethe

The waters hissed, the waters rose,
The Fisherman alongside,
Quietly gazing at his rod,
Cool at heart, inside.
And as he listens, as he sits,
The waters split and rise:
Out of the flowing waters hiss
A mermaid meets his eyes.

She sang to him, she spoke to him:
‘Why do you lure my children
With human art and cunning,
Up to their warm extinction?
Ah, if you knew how snugly
Little fish live in the deep,
You yourself would join me,
You’d be happy indeed.

Doesn’t the sweet Sun bathe
And the Moon, here, in the sea?
Show with the waves they breathe
Faces doubly bright to see?
Doesn’t this heavenly deep,
Lure you, this rain-clear blue?
Doesn’t your own gaze leap
Drawn down to eternal dew?’

The water hissed, the water rose
Wetting his naked feet:
His heart so full of yearning, oh,
As if him his Love did greet.
She spoke to him, she sang to him:
All was soon done, and o’er:
She half pulling, he half sinking,
And he was seen nevermore. 

Kaufmann on Christian Interpretation and Hell

Millions of Christians agree on this claim and back it up by citing Gospel passages they like; but different people pick different passages. To some, Jesus looks like St. Francis, to others like John Calvin, and to many more the way a man named Hoffmann painted him. Pierre van Paassen's Jesus is a Socialist and Fosdick's a liberal, while according to Reinhold Niebuhr Jesus' ethic coincides, not surprisingly, with Niebuhr's. To use a political term: almost everybody gerrymanders, carving an idealized self-portrait from the Gospels and much less attractive straw men from the literatures of other faiths. A great deal of theology is like a jigsaw puzzle: the verses of Scripture are the pieces, and the finished picture is prescribed by each denomination with a certain latitude allowed. What makes the game so pointless is that not all pieces have to be used, and any piece that does not fit may be reshaped, provided one says first, "this means." That is called exegesis.

Finally, the Jesus of the New Testament believed, and was not greatly bothered by his belief, that God would damn and torment the mass of mankind in all eternity. According to all three Synoptic Gospels, he actually reassured his disciples: "If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha than for that town."  This is no isolated dictum; the Sermon on the Mount, for example, is also punctuated by threats of Hell.

Augustine, Aquinas, arid Calvin stressed Hell, but many Christian apologists today simply ignore all such passages. A few insist that in a couple of inter-testamentary apocalypses we find far more detailed visions of Hell. They do not mention that these apocalypses would not be known today if it had not been for the esteem in which the early Christians held them. For the Jews rejected them while accepting the humane teachings of men like Hillel and Akiba. Rabbi Akiba, a contemporary of Paul and the Evangelists, taught that "only those who possess no good deeds at all will descend into the netherworld"; also that "the punishment of the wicked in Gehinnom lasts twelve months."

On writing

"Warum willst du dich von uns Allen
Und unsrer Meinung entfernen?"
Ich schreibe nicht euch zu gefallen,
Ihr sollt was lernen!

"Why do you wish to leave us
And our opinions?"
I write not to please you,
You should learn something!

Goethe

Sister passing

In mother's eyes streamed love
Child born into the world
Heart and lungs too weak to work
Hope's finger grasped in little hand

Today you died sweet infant
Heaven does not answer prayers
Can those prayers bring comfort now?
She's gone false consolation!

(Indifferent heaven Thee we curse
Oh that we might forget Thee
Unrequited love Thou mockest
Impotent Omnipotence!)

Tiny child we loved you
More than gods know how
Tonight a candle lit
To honour sister's passing

Spiritus

Nos habitat, non tartara, sed nec sidera coeli: Spiritus in nobis qui viget, illa facit.  A.N., Epist. v.14.

It dwells in us, not in the underworld, and indeed not in the starry heaven: the Spirit who is living in us makes all this.

The logic of Sacrifice (A letter)

Something beautiful?  I wish I could draw it out of the very field of molecules whirling about me.  Perhaps I could if I had more time.

This morning, however, I've been reading de Sade.  He is the opposite of beautiful.  He is destruction.  He is rape and murder.  He is the slit throat of a dead prostitute.  He is a child torn to shreds in a frenzy, broken skulls, wine and blood, bloody corpses, screaming and blasphemy.  People are his playthings.  His pleasure is their suffering.  Try as I might there is no beauty to be found here. But somehow he finds the divine in all this.  Perhaps it is because the Divine once desired the destruction of peoples, once demanded the blood of gentle lambs soaking his altar, spilled from gaping slit throats.  Even Christianity touches on violence and the divine, as Bataille says:

"The ordeal of the Cross itself links Christian conscience to the frightfulness of the divine, though blindly.  The divine will only protect us once its basic need to consume and to ruin has been satisfied."

And this is true.  Why the cross, that torturous stake?  Only after the scourges and rending of the Saviour's flesh can we receive the blessing!  Marcion was wrong to deny the God of the Jews was the same God of the Christians.  Here's how we know: This God is bloodthirsty.  He demands blood before bestowing gifts upon the people.

But I have to add a qualification here.  The God of the Jews demanded death as a satisfaction.  The God of the Christians demands death so he can create anew.  Bataille stops at the cross, but he should visit the empty tomb.  This is little consolation in the end however.  Why, one might ask, must we destroy before we can witness the new creation?  Why must the Saviour be covered in his own blood and filth, pierced by crude nails, before he can know his own exaltation?  This is still the logic of the old god, the logic of satisfaction, now with a promise.  When I sacrifice myself for the love of Christ I do so to remove myself out of my own way in order for the new man in Christ to come forth.  I cannot pour new wine into old wineskins.  But when Jesus was sacrificed, who was it he had to remove?  He was already the man of God, full of the new wine.  Here we see the scandal: We do not die like Jesus, he was a true sacrifice.. the last bloody corpse to satisfy the old god.  Sacrifice today means something quite different.

Ghost