Reading – Page 3 – 19 Cent Notebook

WHISTLING IN THE ABYSS

Christian Wimin is a talented poet and long-suffering spiritual seeker whom I discovered through his book, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer.

He has forced me to do something I did not anticipate when I picked him up to read: I rejected him — or a good part of him, or, at least, what I take to be him, or, if not him, his spiritual thesis, to the extent that I understand it. I can only go by what I read, and I read the following on page 111:

The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular kowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of srtychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneoulsly transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erotion rots from within. Only when doctriine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance. Truth inheres not in doctrine itself, but in the spirit with which it is engaged, for the spirit of God is always seeking and creating new forms.

So, everything is relative, or “provisional”? Even God? Really? What use is a “provisional” or ephemeral or conditional, here today/gone tomorrow God?

Well –okay. I think I get what he’s saying. Such feelings have led me and multitudes to a kind of agnosticism in which the nature of God eludes us, or we suffer from God’s silence. Or, when it comes to orgnized religion and orthodox Christianity in particular, everything always seems, sooner or later, to ossify into stale praxis in musty old buildings or cold glassy ones, both eminating spiritual emptiness, clericalism where genuine spirituality is smothered by clostrophobic bureacracies, all supported by heaps of dry, demanding documents we call “doctrines” and “dogmas.” We’ve often been heartened by the bumper sticker slogans that proclaims them to be dubious and worthy of death (e.g., “my karma ran over my dogma.”)

(By the way, the default religion of the modern soul seems to be Buddhism –until you read the disenchanted testimonials of disaffected Buddhists disavowing Buddhist orthodoxy, or any claim that there is just One Path — or any limit to the numbers of paths to enlightment. Self-will is forever the bus running over any dogma, however orthodox or heterodox.)

What sent Wimin off on this heterodox tilt was a quote from that unendingly renowned spiritual culture hero, the late Thomas Merton. . That statement was: “The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.”

There is much to like about Merton. I like much about him. I once owned both his Seven Storey Mountain (read it and was moved by it) and The Sign of Jonah, his late 1940s jounal of his early monastic years. He somehow seems to maintain great popularity among self-identifying “liberal” Catholics who identify as “spiritual” but reject dogma and doctrine. Merton, before his untimely death in 1968, was plainly off on a tilt of his own, becoming topical and rather political over issues of war, peace and nuclear armament and more interested in eastern religious traditions and seemingly less willing to be bound by his once-vital vocation as a Trappist Monk happily embracing Christian orthodoxy or the centuries-old Benedictine rule.

That’s fine, to a degree. Everybody, even the best, now and then take a spiritual walk around the block. But I believe during Merton’s particular walk, his once rich vocation was sheered away as, more and more, he felt the need to become socially “relevant” but less orthodox within the silence of the cloister. That, in itself, made him popular with a less orthodox fringe of the Church eager to shake off what it percieves or experiences to be the rigidity of doctrine.

Wimin’s sour verdict on that quote of Merton’s is that it amounts to “a little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life.”

Oh, dear!

Then he goes on to write, “To be fair, Merton himself certainly realized this later in his life, when he became interested in merging ideas from Christianity with Buddhism.”

Ah, sweet syncretism! A kind of srtychnine pride (to borrow a phrase from Wimin) of the agnostic dabbler. It did not, in my opinion, enrich Merton. It diverted him — pridefully.

I long ago, during a period of “searching,” read Merton’s Mystics and Zen Master. I don’t doubt that mystics (some of them Christian) and Zen Masters might find some common spiritual ground. But I would enter the exalted company of the likes of G.K. Chesterton and suggest that Christian tradition and orthodoxy has not failed but really never been tried — that the nature of our search is, with the help of God’s grace, to be more Christlike, amending our lives accordingly. And while there might be nothing truly left to discover doctrinally, there is much to learn. Our understanding of doctrine can grown and develop, just as we come to know and better understand the nature of an oak tree as it grows from a seed to a flourishing mass of branches and leaves and, organically, resists any effort to become a banana tree. And thre is, in fact, really much to re-discover in the spiritual realm, especially in the search after a greater knowledge of our individual selves and our relationship to the one-and-only true God based on the earthly actions and pronouncements of the Second Person of the Trinity. This, I submit,m is a divine adventure, full of thrills and spills, darkness and light.

I’ll own that Christian Wimin’s intense strivings toward what we might call enlightenment or even sanctity are authentic and heroic. He has long battled a painful form of bone cancer, and kept on searching and writing through pain and multiple operations. He is a most admirable and talented and insightful soul. But I just hate to see him falling, in this particular instance, back on a pedestrian agnosticism and spiritual relativism, suggesting (as he seems to) that Christian doctrine is a product of pride and is infinitely protean, as is the God who is its subject. And he does so in vivid, concrete, almost disdainful terms: we must view God as “provisional” and as ever elusive, or our faith becomes a “corpse.” Ouch! That makes us gods, right? We’ve seen this movie before — from Eden on. It is a war on certitiude that seems to sanctify doubt. Wimin might (I could only hope) profit from the admonition of St. John Henry Newman, which was offered to me at an especially painful, grief-filled, confused and doubting period of my youth — that “a thousand difficulties do not constitute one single ‘doubt’.”

But I know that’s a thesis always destined to be rejected by those who simply don’t ever want to be common travelers with observant or orthodox Christians of any stripe.

The Christian religion, being codified and administered according to the divergent practices and beliefs of infinitely splintering congregations and denomination, can turn people away. To wit:

I was just in the company of a woman who attented the Southern Baptist funeral of a friend’s son who’d struggled his whole life with drug addition and recently died of an overdose. As she tells it, there was no divine conslation to be had at the preacher’s hand or from his mouth. He spoke in roaring fashion only of the possibility that the young man, a sinner like all of us, might or might not have found his eternal destiny in heaven and hell was alway a possibility. (Undeniably true.) Disenchanted in the extreme, she vowed never again to enter a Southern Baptist Church. Well, I might point out that that stuff from the preacher (again, as she tells it) ain’t orthodoxy. That’s heresy, in my Catholic book (and catechism). It’s Calvin, Zwigli and Luther working by their dreary, benighted, human lights.

It is worth noting that Christian Wimin, a bright an inquisitive soul, had an intense pentacostal upbringing in Texas and probably didn’t encounter an unbeliever until he got to college — and realized he was faking his salvation. Wouldn’t that be a bitch? Same sort of thing happens with Catholics. To an extent, it happened to me. When I realized my faith had gone unchallenged, it nearly dissolved under pressure.

But according to Catholic belief, we must persevere to the end, through the dark valley, depending on God’s supportive grace and mercy which are always available through our prayers, the prayers of our loved ones and, especially, through the sacraments, those visible signs of grace. We are saved or condemned by our own actions and we see now only “through a glass darkley.”

Yeah, I’m talking voodoo to a lot of non-believers. But, as that old sinner Kurt Vonnegut might have said, “so it goes.”

So, again, we are various grades of stumblers, and all children of the one God who can save us, lift us up after we fall. We have only to ask and, exercising free choice. Offered for our guidance, which we are free to reject, is what comes to us through centuries-old….doctrine.We seek love, understanding and forgiveness from one another if we are functioning normally and properly according to that “bright”-ness that illuminates Christian Wimin’s abbys. Could it be otherwise with the God we claim to believe and whom we don’t, out of love, wish to offend as we find Him in other people, even our enemies? God reaches us or is defeated in us in this very frail and human way.

Of course, I often love my sins, even the memory of them, more than I love God. I admit it. So I shouldn’t mind it when conscience begins blinking its red warning light. We CAN fall from grace. And I’m not preaching here. Just whistling in the abyss, and hoping it stays “bright” for me. And for you. For all of us.

Christian Wimin has written a short poem that reads:

My God my bright abyss

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this:

(Yes, he ends with a colon — a fill-in-the-blank ending, still, at the volume’s end, blank.)

Let me be clear:

But note: Christian Wimin’s subtitle tells us he IS a believer. And he is a poet. So much of the Christian Bible is written in poetry, much of it beautiful. And from Job to the psalm writer, there is much anguished questioning. (Any actual readers of this blog might go back to the entry called, “On Serious Earth,” a meditation on atheist poet Philip Larkin’s poetic meditations while exploring a church buiding. Read Job while you’re at it. And Lamentations….)

In conclusion: G.K. Chesterton from his classic, Orthodoxy:

The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepeted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficulty thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob….

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

And, really, isn’t that basically what good old Thomas Merton meant and never truly ceased meaning, even as he now and then fell — and rose again? That we arrive home and recognize it for the first time. We discover that the truest thing has already been discovered. Isn’t it the truest and worst pride to be be found in the impulse to think otherwise?

Keep searching, Christian Wimin. You are well-named. I’m with you in that abyss. Whistling when it gets dark. Listen for me. It may be that we are home and don’t want to say so. Believing nothing believe in this – that there is nothing new to be discovered, just a difficult love to be embraced. Reliable sources have told me that that way lies joy and freedom.

I’m not there yet. How about you?

IN AMERICA…

In America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is –that is what makes America what it is. –Gertrude Stein

Though popular historiography has stressed the ‘Age of the Robber Barons’ and deplored the gross materialism of the epoch (i.e., the closing decades of the 19th Century), this hostile view is not borne out by the facts, which display a panorama of general progress in which all classes shared and in which all intellectual and cultural interests were abudently displayed — a panorama, indeed, highlighted by the emergence of quintessentially American geniuses.

-Paul Johnson, A History of the American People

Gertrude Stein, probably viewing her homeland from Paris, Brit Paul Johnson viewing it from a nearly equal distance in England. Views of our homeland, over a century or more later keep tumbling and rearranging kaleidoscopically as our social and cultural realities advance or, perhaps, retrogress. Less open space, for sure, more or less materialistic, as ever. People pouring across the border; geniuses, variously engaged in the culture, still seemingly in good supply,quirky Gertrude Stein among them, now a memory. But again, an ex-patriate. We lost people, we gained millions more. We shift about, restless, angry, anxious. America, the Beautifully Open and Complex and Troubled.

Our future uncertain, as ever. God help us.

LITERARY TURNS

The literary movement of the (eighteen) nineties had, at the turn of the century, brought the American face to face with the age of science. As industry herded him from the farms where he was responsible to the weather and the earth into the cities where he took his orders from steam and electric power, wheels and cogs, even the average unthinking man was forced to some sort of revaluation of his basic concepts and values.

Robert Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature

To which I’d add…

The literary movement of the (nineteen) nineties, at the turn of the century, brought Americans face to face with, among many other things, terror — including terror over the placement of — pronouns.

BELIEF

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

American philosoper Charles Sanders Peirce, from How to Make Our Ideas Clear

The word “God,” so “capitalised” (as we Americans say), is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium*; in my belief, really creator of all three Universes of Experience.

*Necessary Being

Charles Sanders Peirce, A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, 1908

THE TASTE OF ASHES

At the 1st Synod of Westminster held at Oscott, England in 1852, St. John Henry Newman preached his famous sermon called, The Second Spring. It was delivered during a period of rabid religious persecution and controversy. It was a beautiful appeal for peace and tolerance.

What follows are the sermon’s rhapsodic beginning lines:

We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, never-ceasing as are it changes, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, it is set up in unity; and, though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again….one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony, how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow.

So the subject here is obviously of a historical religious nature. But Newman’s words amount to a longing for spring, rebirth, peace and order — and they have an eternal ring and application. In 2022, we are ever so much in need of a Second Spring on every mortal front, from your house to the Ukraine.

It might seem a trite sentiment on the tongue — saying we long for spring. But, then, abiding natural truths when we voice them, or, if you will, taste them, in contrast to their evil opposite (like all spoken supernatural truths AND evils and ALL benevolent realities that struggle to life like spring blossoms despite threatening tangles of malign, poisonous vines) — yes, these, put into words, often DO sound trite. Yes, they do.

But forgive, please, me while I torture another metaphor and say, as this difficult winter in the world draws to a close, that we are longing for that old taste of spring. We fear it may have a stale taste. We like to think it would taste much better if we could only truly bite into it.

In the Ukraine, however, our fear is that it would taste like ashes.

OF THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong….I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.

–Socretes, as quoted by his student Plato in the Apology.

Socrates had been accused of “corrupting the youth” of Athens and was, as such, to become an ancient — and perhaps the first — victim of the “cancel culture”.

As to the calculation of whether he’d live or die — they killed him.

ASH WEDNESDAY, 2022

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

To turn our hearts towards God, to be converted, means that we must be prepared to use all means to live as He expects us to live.

–Francis Fernandez, In Conversation with God

A pure heart create in me, O God; put a steadfast spirit within me.

–Psalm 50

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto thee.

T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

OF BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES

Democracy entails both external limits — borders and boundaries for both passage and conduct that make for a commmunity of citizens and not just residents or self-assertive rights-bearers — and internal limits that require self-limitation in accord with the moral law and the requirements of civic common good.

from The demanding & delecate task of conservatism, The New Criterion, January, 2022

by Daniel J. Mahoney, professor emeritus, Assumption University, Senior Fellow at the Real Clear Foundation, and Senior Writer at Law and Liberty

WHO HAS THE (GOOD) IDEAS NOW?

Lionel Trilling in 1950:

…it is the plain fact that nowadays,there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation…The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in actons or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.“

There you have a seventy-two-year old manifestation of liberal smugness, ignorance, illusion and isolation. But perhaps this was, indirectly, a call to arms for the conservative movement which was underground and burst out in full view in the mid-fifties and, happily, struggles on today between the extremes of Democratic radicalism and Republican fecklessness.

But it is not entirely inaccurate to suggest that genuine conservatism, as opposed to Trumpism, etc., has once again lost its confidence or sense of direction.

Academia and the mainstream media treat conservatism as a kind of mental disorder. And they are likely to confuse the rabble that burst into the halls of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with conservatism. I submit that this is a willful libel, and that they know better. I guess that action would fall into Lionel Trillings curious and wrongheaded 1950 diagnosis of a “conservative” action, or an “irritable mental gesture” transformed into mass action.

But, in the realm of ideas, look out there and see who really look like the crazy ones.

To be fair, look left and right. But don’t just observe the “irritable mental gestures” or actions of one side. Read! We’re talking about ideas here.

Sadly, however, there may be, as I think about it, much truth in British philsopher Roger Scruton’s diagnosis of the crisis of conservatism as stated in 1980, thirty years after liberal Lionel Trilling offered his two cents worth on the subject. Scruton wrote, Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae or aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expresson, when compelled, skeptical.

Conservative New York Times columnist Roger Douthat wrote recently, the ossified Reaganism that the younger conservatives intend to supplant is locked into the world of 1980.

Yes, there are, indeed, new brands of conservatism afoot in the land. Among the exponants of one such brand I might be at a loss to label might be counted Roger Kimbell, an art, culture and political commentator and editor of the journal, The New Criterion. And in the midst of a long analysis of the current state of conservatism in the current issue, he suggests that the election of Donald Trump, “unlikely though it seemed at the time” and given the alternatives, might have amounted to a battle for the soul of the country and, for some scholars and voters, in the current polarized state of affairs, may well have represented “the only chance for national survival.”

Which is why Kimball, an obviously intelligent and cultivated fellow, has spoken and written well elsewhere of Trump’s four years in the White House — of how he cut down illegal immigratiion, cut down on witch hunts on campus under Title IX provisions and mandates and racialist attacks throughout the federal bureacracy under the rubric of “critical race theory.” He’s written of how the 1776 initiative, begun under Trump, aimed at reviving in schools and colleges and, in the culture, an appreciation of our founding ideals — over against the tendendcy to blame America first in Academia, the media and corporate culture.

But, properly speak, he noted, this was more the “populist spirit” than conservatism, strictly speaking. (I’d also note that there is a strong strain of libertarianism in it.) And there were those elements of The Strongman, of which I, for one, remain deeply skeptical, if not fearful, when it occurs on the right or the left. In history, fascism, right and left, always seemed to coalesce around a single person and become a cult.

But what is that “populist spirit” as it is manifesting itself on American soil?

It is anti-globalist, prizes individiual liberty, limited government, distrust of the regulatory and administratie state and identity politics.

Ultimately, it is a case of the powerful influence of the elite in academia, the media and corporations versus the rest of us.

It is, I’ll admit, very odd to have cultivated, conservative intellectuals and historians on the order of Kimball or Victor Davis Hanson vouching in any way for the crass Barbarian Donald Trump. Kimball has merely suggested that Trump is “a narcisist who never managed to learn the subtleties of narcisism.” I read in that an implied comparison with the likes of Trump’s presidential prececessors Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, though I could be wrong.

Keep in mind that the flagship publication of the traditional conservative movement, The Naitonal Review, founded by the late William F. Buckley, Jr., declared itself in the harshest terms opposed to a Trump presidency even before Trump won the nomination. And that opposition remains in place today. It has been critically suggested, among other things, in the pages of that journal, that Trump shattered the norms of presidential behavior in ways toxic to the body politic. And he’s still out there, aching to get back into power, while Democrats, drifting out to sea in a barque captained by a vain, borderline senescent stooge of those powerful interests enumerated above, pulls out to sea with him.

But, back to ideas. The late conservative scholar Richard Weaver wrote a book called, Ideas Have Consequences. I think I need to read it. Perhaps we all do.

More on all this later. For in 2022, ideas are going to have many consequences.

EPIPHANY MOMENT

Before I and everyone else packs up our creches for another year, some thoughts on the Magi — and that Star.

It’s nearly little Christmas.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the the Star, and the Magi who followed it. How many were there? It’s not known, but legend has it they bore three gifts and they may represent, among other things, the three stages of life, or the three branches of the human race, semitic, white, black (which, of course, omits the Asian and therefore is beyond imperfect). The Magi were a once-powerful priestly caste of the Medes and the Persians, as recorded by Herodotus and others. They studied astrology and the divination of dreams.

How did they know about the blessed event? How far did they have to travel to Bethlehem?

They could have met with a very harsh fate had the brutal and crazed dictator Herod known they had ignored his request to report back to him the birthplace of savior. They could not have known, initially, of his terrifying and murderous reputation.

They were also said to be descendants of the great soothsayer Balaam. Nothing indicates that they enjoyed any great power at the time of the birth of Christ.

What about the star?

Identifying the star — that Star — is a thorny issue. How could these men, working with only the naked eye or the most rudimentary scientific instruments, have made astronomical observations of any precision? This is pretty much, word for word, the observation of that renowned and now mostly forgotten late French Catholic scholar Henri Daniel-Rops, writing in his marvelous book, Jesus and His Time.

It could have been a “nova” similar to the new star that appeared in the Consetllation Aquila in 1918 or that was noticed in 1572 after the massacre of St. Bartholeomew’s Day. But no writers on those times in question recorded such an appearance.

Halley’s Comet, when it appeared on January 10, 1910, was visible in Jerusalem, its light observed to pass rapidly from east to west, becoming difused in the east and reapparring in full visibility to the west, as indicated in the Gospel Story. But Halley’s Comet could only have passed over the sky of the countries in question during the year 12 B.C. and not the year 6 B.C., when it is most often speculated that Christ was born. Other comments recorded by Chinese astronomers in the years 4 and 3 B.C. tell us it would not have been visible in Western Asia. Also, a comet, being subject to their diurnal orbit like other stars, could not indicate a precise location, much less a particlar house in a particular town.

Kepler thought that this celestial pheonmenon might be a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn as occurred again recently. His calculations suggest this could have occurred in the year 6 B.C., even though this date was not yet considered the most probable date for the birth of Christ. Interesting.

And the word “star” as used in scripture does not mean the stars ordinarly visible, but indicates some astronomical phomenon.

On the borderland of science and legend, as Daniel-Rops puts it, is Russian poet Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s theory that the “star” of the Gospel was a rare celestial phenomenon, an equinocrtial passage of Aries through Pisces which would signify to the Babylonian Magi, haunted by the idea of a recurring deluge, the an announcment of the end of the world and a new age in the history of the human race.

St. John Chrystosom, though pre-scientific, knew that stars don’t do what the star of Bethlehem was said to do — that according to Catholic convert and scripture scholar Scott Hahn.

Stars in the sky were often identified with angels in heaven. The philosopher Philo of Alexandria speculated that the stars “are living cratures, but a kind composed entirely of mind.”

Thus John Chrystosom concluded that this was an appearnace of a Christmas angel. Those celestial messengers are forever being caught up in the cosmic drama, from the creation of the world. Good and bad angels are, to the devout mind, what accounts daily for all that is communicated to us in our universe. They are everywhere in the Christmas story.

My patron saint, Gregory the Great, according to Scott Hahn, accepted the angelic interepretation. He also observed the great difference beween the way God dealt with the shepherds and how he dealt with the Magi. The shepherds, though uneducated members of the lowest rank, were still members of the chosen people. They’d been hearing all their lives the prophesies of liberation destined for the Jews. So it was, says Gregory, that God announced Christ to them with angels.

“But a sign, not a voice, guided the gentiles,” writes Scott Hahn. He quotes Gregory’s homily on the Ephiphany, asserting that the Magi ” they were not prepared to make full use of reason to know the Lord.”

In other words, as Scott Hahn notes, when it came to understand the meaning of Christmas, “the simplest of pious field hands were better equipped than the most erudite scholars.”

But those scholars, to their eternal credit, came in an ardent search for the truth. “That’s something the angels could see — and work with,” writes Hahn.

And, it should be noted, they ultimately got their share of important angelic knowledge: an angel apperared to them in one of their dreams in time to steer them clear of Herod who might (God help us!) have tortured them to extract the knowedge they now posessed of the Infant Jesus’s whereabouts.

Thank you, angels.

And so, like those truth-seeking foreign gentile travelers, we must let the angels work with us and guide us now and to the end of our own desert journeys.

.…This Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death…

T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

Yet the poet has his lone Magi, reflecting long after that journey and the witnessing of that birth, proclaim that he and his fellow travelers were afterwards no longer at home or at peace in their native lands (w)ith an alien people clutching their gods.

I know how he feels.

And so I say a wistful goodbye for another anxious year to those fellow travelers.

God willing, I’ll see them — we’ll all see them — again next year, in peace and joy.