1 post tagged “gifts and calling”

"The fierce power of imagination is a gift from God"
--Kabbalah

"Love God as God is a not-God, a not-mind, a not-person, a not-image.
--Meister Eckhard Sermon 12

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed."
--Gerard Manly Hopkins
"No Worst, There is None"

"Sweet are the uses of Adversity
which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
--Shakespeare

Why is it so important that you are with God 
and God alone on the mountain top? It's 
important because it's the place in which you
can listen to the voice of the One who calls  
you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the 
One who calls you "my beloved daughter,"
"my beloved son," "my beloved child." To pray is to let that voice
speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice
resound in your whole being.

    --Henri Nouwen

**
Lucifer falls,  Alice falls,  so does Icarus.  Humpty Dumpty falls.
The giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk" falls.  Jack and Jill fall.  The Titans 
tumble earthwad for nine days straight.  Elpenor slips headlong from Circe's.
roof.  Adam and Eve supposedly fall,  though in fact the theological idea of a
lapse into sin is Christian in origin,  the necessary precondition for rapture.  We must
fall so that Christ can raise us.  Read Genesis, however,  and you'll see that the authors
of the Hebrew scriptures,  their imaginations defined perhaps by the long horizons of
the Fertile Crescent,  conceive of expulsion in lateral terms.  The central metaphor
is not descent but exile.  Still,  the experience of falling is so fundamental that is lends
itself to moral and existential embellishment.
Witnessed or not,  an accidental fall entails a loss of dignity.  Our upright posture most
distinguishes Homo erectus from that class of creatures that the  Bible identifies as
"creeping,"  and no animal is creepier than that enigmatic serpent whose curse it is to
crawl upon the ground,  just as no animal topples more easily than we do.  Quadrupeds
wobble and trip when newborn,  but rarely thereafter.  Just think what a horrific sight it
is to see a racehorse go down.  Implicit in the biblical stories is a kind of hierarchy of being
that seems to mirror the human body cosmologically.  I suspect that Zeus and Baal and
Yahweh Himself may be associated with mountaintops and clouds in part because our eyes
are among our own most altitudinous organs.  To be human is to defy gravity.  To be a
snake is to embrace it.  The snake is thus our anatomical opposite,  though when we fall
-- or sleep,  or have sex,  or die -- we assume a serpentine posture,  a fact implicit
in the symbolism of  Genesis.
Only with the Hellenic distinction between the body and the spirit could we imagine the
dead ascending like helium balloons into the sky.  The flight of Icarus is not merely an
allegory about human ambition.  It is an allegory about our ambition to slip our mortal
bonds.  Only the soul may ascend;  the body must plummet.  To be earthbound is to be
deathbound.  In the theater of  battle to fall means to die.  The same logic governs the
collapse of architecture and empires,  those collective attempts to defy gravity and time.
But there is also a pleasure in falling,  in giving in, in assenting to gravity's pull.  Although
we can fall into disgrace,  we can also fall into a trance, or sleep,  or love.  What  these
experiences have in common is the surrendering of the will -- to music, or to unconsciousness,
or to another.  These are all varieties of bewilderment.  In the absence of pain, falling ill
can accord some of the same pleasures as falling in love.  There is a voluptuousness to
illness,  the eros of the infantile.  Even seemingly disastrous falls can be accompanied by
the joy of relief or the exhilaration of chaos.
***
"Contact!  Contact!"  Thoreau shouted at the heavens from atop Mount Ktaadn.  "Where
are we?  Who are we?"  And the heavens did not reply."

From "Falling; Confessions of a lapsed forest Christian" by Donovan Hohn
Harpers Magazine,  April 2008

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Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”

God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

(from Faith and Theology)

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