Present Only As A Silence

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.

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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

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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

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[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

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"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

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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.

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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"

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cross-posted to Alive On All Channels

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