We
do ourselves a disservice if we think of, say, the onset of faith in
religious truth too exclusively in terms of Big Sudden Conversion
Events...We start longing for the experience of conversion, the
gratifying sensation that we are surrendering ourselves completely to
an insuperable power, rather than longing, say, to have been converted.
This presumptive longing for the sudden, totalizing experience of
comprehensiveness is, I think, a bit too driven by envy. And our
longing, post-conversion, for the enduring, permanent experience of
fullness is ditto too driven by pride.
Permalink
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"In the forest of estrangement" via wood_s_lot
Sometimes in that forest, where from afar I see and feel myself, a
light breeze spreads a mist, and that mist is the dark, clear vision of
the alcove where I exist in reality, among these hazy pieces of
furniture and drapes and nocturnal torpor. Then the breeze subsides and
the landscape of that other world returns to being completely and
exclusively itself... At other times this small room is but an ashen
whiff of fog on the horizon of that so different land.... And there are
times when this tangible alcove is the ground we tread in that other
land....(...)
The static motion of the trees; the troubled quiet of the fountains;
the indefinable breathing of the saps; deep pulsing; the slow arrival
of dusk, which seems not to fall over things but to come from inside
them and to reach its spiritually kindred hand up to that distant
sorrow (so close to our soul) of the heavens' lofty silence; the steady
and futile falling of leaves, drops of estrangement in which the
landscape comes to exist only in our hearing, and it becomes sad in us
like a remembered homeland - all of this girded us uncertainly, like a
belt coming undone.(...)
None of our yearnings has any reason to exist. Our attentive gaze is an absurdity allowed by our winged inertia.
- Fernando Pessoa,The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith
*
Mountain Spirit, leader of the Mountain Spirits, you body is holy.
By means of it, make him well again.
Make his body like your own.
Make him strong again.
He wants to get up with all of his body.
For that reason, he is performing this ceremony,
Do that which he has asked of you.
Long ago, it seems you restored someone's legs and eyes for them.
This has been said.
In the same way, make him free again from disease.
That is why I am speaking to you.
-Apache poem-prayer addressed to the mountain spirits
**
[He] had been
visited in all his senses: touched as by an unction on his cruel eyes
that had not seen the countenance of pardon; on his inattentive ears,
which had not heard the groaning of the Holy spirit; on his wild-beast
nostrils, which had not perceived the fragrant odor of the divine
rapture; on the sepulcher on his mouth, which had not eaten the
living bread; on his violent hands, which had not helped to carry the
Savior's cross; on his impatient feet, which had hastened in all
directions, except towards the holy sepulcher. That word conversion, so often prostituted, if applied to him, did not altogether explain the catastrophic change.
- Leon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor
*
"I don't seek
Truth with a capital T. For one thing, I believe that faith usually
happens in much more haphazard fashion. There will always be stories
of Christians who consider the arguments on both sides, like Justice
weighing her scales, and then favor Christianity as most true. But
for every one of these today, there are three who enter by a side
door. A friend helps in a time of crisis and shows you how to pray. A
local parish opens its doors at a time when you need to get warm.
Perhaps even something inexplicable happens to you -- call it spiritual
experience -- and it begins to make sense to explore more of that sort
of thing with like-minded others. Becoming a person of faith takes a
lifetime, and it begins far more often in participation than it does
in some sort of judging. the French philosopher Blaise Pascal
criticized the approach to faith that says it begins with belief. You
start with belonging, he said. belief comes later, and even then,
belief comes and goes. Consistent belief is not essential to faith.
-Jon M. Sweeney
Almost Catholic
*
The creation of
diamonds. A blip. The crocheting of DNA. A blip. Cross-stitch of
the bilateral face. A blip. Condensation of tears from Paleozoic
seas. A blip. Endurance of the strange, the doubly strange, the
tiply strange particle. A blip. The time it takes to bring you past
the kiss, past the coupling, past the nearly dispassionate
concentration, so that time can stop. Blip. Blip. Blip.
But the nine
months, the terrible twos, the childhood, adolescence, adulthood,
all the elongation of growing up and its estranging inwardness, the
longed for reconciliation of parent and child before death, the wait
for rebirth: a these take forever.
What are you thinking now about eternal life? That it will be life
eternally. And the bloody news at breakfast will continue. And the
free floating anxiety will continue. And the cosmic indifference will
continue. but so will nakedness with my wife, black coffee in the
morning, being read Dickens by my daughter before bedtime.
What are you thinking now about eternal life? That I will shed my
guilt like sodden running clothes and hear the hymn of praise beginning
in my throat as the multifoliate radiance anoints my face like a stiff
hot shower and blurs every memory of earth.
*
When the preacher stood before the class that day in June, 1968, and
said that history was a river that God entered at will, he wished to
console us for the assassinations. To comfort those who mourned. But
no one seemed to understand. Perhaps no one was mourning.
Perhaps he should have said that history was a freeway that God entered
at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was a TV show that
God interrupted at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was
six periods of stone boredom five consecutive days a week and an
afterschool job and a weekend of chores that God canceled at will. He
said history was a river. And the only river we knew was the Los
Angeles, a concrete flood channel we had never seen in flood, running
alongside the freeway like a giant gutter.
And the killing that spring had occurred on people's 16th birthdays.
Behind, beyond, before and after, existing now but separately,
accessible in some special instance, like prayer, but present only as
a listening, present only as a signal coming from a distance, present
only as a silence.
We can live eternally like that. But for the time being, we will live as we are, for as long as we can.
These are the gifts of the spirit. The belief that the body is
enough. The belief that love is a god. The belief that the next world
is this world perfected.
--Mark Jarman
excerpts from "History"
from the collection "Epistles"
*
cross-posted to Alive On All Channels
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