Inhabiting Time

A question made me stop in the middle of the trottoir today as I walked towards my office, listening to a podcast by Melvyn Bragg, "History of ideas". His guests, distinguished neuroscientists and philosophers and writers, were discussing a really "hot" topic : "What does it mean to be me?". I remember various club members quite struggling with the question, personally and now some of us, professionally, so of course I was all ears.

One of the guests said at some point, talking about the moment when she thought she emerged as a distinct person: "I was wondering how I could inhabit fully the limited time I was given".

To inhabit time fully; that's the way I have never thought about life! Much in it has been about space, but actually little, about time. Yet, as I am growing older (yes I know, I am the eternal youngest of the lot anyway), inhabiting time sounds quite meaningful to me. Aren't we included in God's creation, aren't we participating in it by inhabiting fully that little slot we are born into?

Britten - Abraham and Isaac (listening notes)

All in all, Pears/Procter is probably the best version I have heard so far, although I do like Mark Padmore / Iestin Davies  very much, mainly for Padmore's part, which is dramatically just perfect, and also for their strange, alien, other-worldly God, who sounds very post-modern. Pears/Procter's God is also other-worldly, in a different way, and Britten playing piano makes it much more present; shame that Pears is not perfectly convincing all the time as Padmore is. The most disappointing was Pears/Baker version, I hate to say; as much as I love Dame Janet, these two voices just don't work well together here. Their God has too much of the other two protagonists; "too human", I would say... Well maybe they have (or had) a point after all. 

The text is available here - and it's really best heard with the text in hand of course. Listening to it again and again, I thought that I have always assumed that God expected Abraham to comply with His stated will -- to sacrifice Isaac unquestioningly, as the Patriarch was ready to do. But what if it was the other way round? What if God asked Abraham to kill his "dear darling" hoping that Abraham will see the absurdity of the request and show mercy towards Isaac? And then when God saw that this was not going to happen, He had to cancel it all, and to send an emergency sacrificial animal to Abraham; the imbecile was going literally to kill his son indeed... I guess this isn't impossible; after all, He desires "not sacrifice but mercy"... 

And on the other hand, the entire piece reminds me of Roublev's Trinity, that perfect harmony of love / will, between God (Holy Spirit), Abraham (Father) and Isaac (Son), even to and beyond the absurd... This is admirable, and so beautiful that actually this is THE reason why I will return again and again to this music. 

About grieving

Stumbled on something about grieving today. That it is bottomless, of course; but more importantly, that it is about being painfully confronted to the reality that will never be the same, hit it as a sparrow hits a transparent window pane, struggle with it and fight it, resent it, hate it, and be exhausted; and eventually, accept it – in peace, I want to hope. Grieving, for me at least, is about recovery, resurrection of a capacity for love, dead with my loved one; the liveliest part of me, the most life-giving, the most overflowing has become distant memory, and that is what feels like being dead. 

And this is why I could not grieve in London: there was nothing to hit against, no reality to overcome, no things-without-Ed to make peace with – just brand new, meaningless void of an anonymous existence. I could have gone to the planet Mars, it wouldn't have been different… No wonder I ended up choking. But now real griefworks commence; now my pain has a sparring partner: this city which keeps track of my long forgotten trajectories, this flower shop we loved, this cafe we used to go for a beer. Getting back here did not make this pain less acute – just possible. But at least, I can make some sense of it. 

Desolatio (A new song in the voice of Mary Magdalene - music hopefully to follow in time)

Desolatio

(A Holy Saturday lament)

Where now have you gone to?

How are we still here?

Lacking our lives’ purpose

Beyond doubt and fear

Desolatio

Beauty now is silenced

Where now is your spirit?

How do things carry on?

Life has lost its meaning

All our hope has gone

Desolatio

Where now is your spirit?

Just a deadweight body

Lying in a cave

How can such lost promise

Ever really save?

Desolatio

Beauty now is silenced

What were all those sayings?

What now do they mean?

All things pass away now

Like they’ve never been

Desolatio

Where now is your spirit?

Beauty now is silenced

He will walk no more

Full hearts are now emptied

Of the hope they stored

Desolatio

Beauty now is silenced

So I must anoint him

Over his body run

Oil and tears and spices

Lost most lovely one

Desolatio

Beauty now is silenced

On thinking

I have to persist. I have to keep asking questions and articulate answers. Until death takes me the other side of the veil, I have to try to think. Better than I used to, clearer, deeper. I need to do a lot of footwork; hours and hours of deliberate practice; I want my thinking as beautiful and as meaningful as music. I want to understand reality, human being, death, suffering, beauty, love, sacrifice, happiness. I have to learn these things, and go beyond learning. And this takes thinking with my heart, with my blood and bowels, with my wounds and infirmities, with my grief, rage, shame, thankfulness, tenderness, wonder, with oil pastels and pencils as much as with my brains. I don't know where it will take me, I do not pretend to be able to answer the questions I ask. I don't even know if I am capable of travelling this way. Maybe it is too late, now. Maybe it doesn't matter. I don't know... But I have to try. 

Heart (Vikram Seth) : I wish I knew

I wake at three, in some slight pain.

I hear no sound of clock or rain, 

No chorus of the stars, no gong, 

Mosquito, siren, horn or plane.

Only my heart beats slow and strong. 

I listen to its certain song.

It does not sympathize but strives

To beat all night and all day long.

Whether my spirit soars or dives,

My blood, at its compulsion, drives 

Through its elastic chambers, through 

My arteries, my veins, my lives.

Above all, to my heart I’m true. 

It does not tell me what to do. 

It beats, I live, it beats again. 

For what? I wish I knew it knew.

Beautiful poem, set in music by Alec Roth and sung by the excellent Mark Padmore, whose fine, light, aerial tenor makes it sound contemporary and timeless. I couldn't find it on YouTube, you have to buy the album... Or pay for Amazon Prime. But every note and every word are worth it. 

Joseph Brodsky, A Song

This poem is on the tip of my tongue for a couple of days. Sharing just to get rid of it, if not of the underlying condition. 

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
The handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.


I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you'd shift the gear.
We'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
to where we've been before.


I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.


I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It's evening; the sun is setting,
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What's the point of forgetting
if it's followed by dying?

On Resurrection

All I know is that before Edward's death, I didn't believe in resurrection, at least not in an individual, personal resurrection (I could imagine being “dissolved in the divine”, in a very intellectual way), let alone resurrection of the body. And now I find that I do believe that the specific glory of the individual human being*, body and soul undivided, will be restored and raised to a fuller life in Christ Jesus. I cannot tell what exactly makes me believe, and I have no idea how come I know this now; but I do, not just as a theory, but as a fact of experience. 

*for God will show your splendour everywhere under heaven. 
4 For God will give you evermore the name,
‘Righteous Peace, Godly Glory’. (Baruch)

"Will the sun forget to streak" - In Memoriam

Will the sun forget to streak
Eastern skies with amber ray,
When the dusky shades to break
He unbars the gates of day?
Then demand if Sheba's queen
E'er can banish from her thought
All the splendor she has seen,
All the knowledge thou hast taught.

Inexhaustible Wells

The return of an old thought of mine, reading Etty Hillesum tonight on the metro: the only thing you can really do with evil and suffering is to absorb them and turn them into kindness. Not to fight it or to wave it away, but to actively transform all forms of evil you encounter into warm and all-embracing love. And I think that maturity of a human being means the ability to do so without being destroyed by the evil absorbed, a kind and degree of inner stability, freedom and sturdiness that makes the worlds spin around your love. (This, I understand, is the meaning of the turning of the cheek business). But if that is to be, then I have to learn to contain, that is, to forgive and accept and be kind with my own pain and aggression and evil first of all, so that they are not spilled and projected all around. And I actually have no idea of the way to do it; for the wells of grief are deep, inexhaustible and mysterious, and I have not found a way yet to touch the bottom and return back unharmed. 

Happiness of rational creatures is NOT the sole aim of God

"The New Atlantis" publishes a long article to Leibniz in its last online issue (http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-optimistic-science-of-leibniz). I was delighted to find in Leibniz the view I have always held:

"To be free and to be both spirit and matter is good, even if this condition allows for evil and unhappiness. For sometimes “an evil brings forth a good,” and it is a false maxim “that the happiness of rational creatures is the sole aim of God.”

God’s creation is immense, and human beings make up only a tiny part of it, spatially and temporally; what makes us unhappy may well contribute to the good of the whole or to other creatures. Those who nevertheless criticize God’s creation, Leibniz writes in Theodicy, should receive the following answer:

You have known the world only since the day before yesterday, you see scarce farther than your nose, and you carp at the world. Wait until you know more of the world and consider therein especially the parts which present a complete whole (as do organic bodies); and you will find there a contrivance and a beauty transcending all imagination. Let us thence draw conclusions as to the wisdom and the goodness of the author of things, even in things that we know not. We find in the universe some things which are not pleasing to us; but let us be aware that it is not made for us alone. It is nevertheless made for us if we are wise: it will serve us if we use it for our service; we shall be happy in it if we wish to be."

Leibniz is an amazing thinker, and an archetypal Five -- unless, given the exceptional breadth and scope of his interests and achievements, he was a rare intellectual Seven :).

Something to believe in

"Preferential love" vs Real Presence

The angel that  presided o'er my birth

Said; "Little creature, form'd of joy and mirth,

Go, love without the help of anything on earth"

William Blake

There are many  ways of turning God into an object; some of them more subtle than the others.

Thus, many educated Christian folks who would never address God as “Father” because it is such a gross anthropomorphism, swallow eagerly the notion of “preferential love” for  God, as if there were “someone” out there to be preferred to someone or something else, as if God could be an object of one's love.

A similar fallacy is the idea that we must “love our neighbors for God’s sake”. God is one thing, and your neighbor is quite another, and you only love them bastards because God “says” you must, or because you find in them some resemblance with a desired object which you call God. Depressing picture...

Of course you actually are not able to love at all, unless God's very love for His creation permeates and informs your attitude. But then you will find yourself loving creatures for their own sake -- on God's behalf, so to speak, representing Him as He dwells in you, with His own abundant and overflowing and boundless care. And if you let this overflowing happen, however incomplete and flawed this may be  -- lo, here you are loving God for His own sake: not as a desired object, but as Real Presence in those and that which you love.

As Chalcedonian definition holds it, in Christ the Two Natures are joined “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”. It is technically impossible to divorce the love of God from the love of His creation: whoever sees Christ, sees the Father.

Nouwen on loneliness

… like Jesus, those who proclaim liberation are called not only to care for their own wounds and the wounds of others, but also to make their wounds into a major source of healing power.

… Maybe the word “loneliness” best expresses our immediate experience and therefore best expresses our immediate experience and therefore most fittingly enables us to understand our brokenness.

Personal loneliness

We live in a society in which loneliness has become one of the most painful human wounds. The growing competition and rivalry that pervade our lives from birth have created in us an acute awareness of our isolation. This awareness has in turn left many with a heightened anxiety and an intense search for the experience of unity and community. It has also led people to ask anew how love, friendship, brotherhood, and sisterhood can free us from isolation and offer us a sense of intimacy and belonging.

All around us we see the many ways by which the people of the Western world are trying to escape this loneliness. Psychotherapy, the many institutes that offer experiences with verbal and nonverbal communication techniques, summer course and conferences supported by scholars, trainers and “huggers” where people can share common problems, and the many experiments that seek to create intimate liturgies where peace is not only announced but also felt—these increasingly popular phenomena are all signs of a painful attempt to break through the immobilising wall of loneliness.

But the more I think about loneliness, the more I think that the wound of loneliness is actually like the Grand Canyon—a deep incision in the surface of our existence that has become an inexhaustible source of beauty and self-understanding. Therefore I would like to voice loudly and clearly what might seem unpopular and maybe even disturbing: The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift.

Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief. But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence. The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for those who can tolerate its sweet pain.

When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated intuitive knowledge—that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition.

This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are prone to play games with our fantasies than to face the truth of our existence. Thus we keep hoping that one day we will find the man who really understands our experiences, the woman who will bring peace to our restless life, the job where we can fulfil our potentials, the book that will explain everything, and the place where we can feel at home.

Such false hope leads us to make exhausting demands and prepares us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering that nobody, and nothing, can live up to our absolutistic expectations. Many marriages are ruined because neither partner was able to fulfil the often hidden hope that the other would take his or her loneliness away. Many celibates live with the naïve dream that in the intimacy of marriage their loneliness will be taken away.

…

A Christian community is therefore a healing community, not because wounds are cured and pains are alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision. Mutual confession then becomes a mutual deepening of hope, and shared weakness becomes a reminder to one and all of the coming strength.

(From The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, pp. 88-91, 100)

Awesome to witness, deadlier to encounter

This is probably the best of the George's Lynley novels, or I have forgotten how masterful a writer George is. While some of her earlier novels could have an irritating number of characters, plots and subplots that eventually one stopped following page 300, here each character has a role clearly designed for them, the subplots move in a well paced, controlled way towards resolution, each revealing their own conflict and building up their own dramatic tension. I found my attention caught by all of them, except perhaps Zed Benjamin's one, because at the bottom of each of them lie the common questions common people are facing in this world: What is reality? What does it mean, to be a family? How do we come to terms with unfulfilled desires that shape the way we are so much? How do we live our lives when they are broken and devastated? How can you see anyone as she or he really is? What happens to a couple when they stumble upon the real people they are within projection created for them by passion? How does it feel, to be locked in a strange body that is not yours? All these motives are woven in a captivating narrative, where different voices struggle with their understanding of truth, which is always beyond reach, just as the beacon in Morecambe bay, the day of the tidal bore, "awesome to witness, deadlier to encounter"... And there is a subtle humour, shining here and there, and also a sense, when you turn the last page, that a way out of a lifetime of lies can be found, if only we come to face the truth -- not that of the others, but our own, looking at us from within.

Now The Green Blade Rises (+playlist)

The Raven that Refused to Sing by Steven Wilson

This is the story of a man who loses his sister at an early age and becomes embittered and reclusive. He believes that the soul of his sister may have entered into the personage of a raven, which he tries to imprison so that it will sing for him whenever he needs it. The raven refuses to sing and it is only in setting it free at his sister's behest that the darkness is banished.

Mistrust. About trust.

Have we had this one before? It's worth repeating anyway:

Mistrust    Rainer Maria Rilke

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them, and only if we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

How could we forget those ancient-myths that stand at the beginning of all races—the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Veni Veni Emmanuel

First Sunday: Happy Advent!

Abiding in fellowship

The practice of "being with", neither evading nor invading the integrity of others, is transformative. It is transformative in those situations that cannot be fixed -- when someone is dying, or living with dementia, or suffering depression or profound grief. This is because it keeps the person suffering in fellowship with the rest of us. They are not left to suffer alone as if we can no longer bear to be present to them, and this means that they can continue to be present, less fearfully, to their own experience. And it is likewise transformative for those situations in which taking some kind of action is a possibility. Action that arises from having attended deeply and non-compulsively to the reality of a situation is very different from the re-action driven by my anxiety to assert control and so deal with my helplessness and other unmet needs. 

Contemplative practice forms us for "being with" reality, letting it and ourselves be. It enables us to discern more clearly when there is something to be done and when there is not. And it enables us to distinguish more clearly between our own needs and the needs of the world. As I am able to be increasingly with my own feelings, of frustration, grief and powerlessness, so I can be in situations that cannot just be fixed at will with a greater measure of peace and freedom... Living contemplatively in the tragic gap opens the possibility of joy in the midst of sorrow and suffering, and of remaining there even when the prospects of "success" seem distant and uncertain. 

Sarah Bachelard, "Experiencing God in a time of crisis", Continuum press, 2012, pp. 103-104. 

There will always be cheerful people who would want to "sort you out", fix and mend it, find a solution; they will patiently and at length explain you what your problem is, and what, in their opinion, you ought to do, and how best to go about it. There will be others who would just disappear -- gone with the wind, faded away; because they "cannot deal with it". Both will send you on a guilt trip: sorry guys, I see you are trying very hard to fix me, but I must be hopeless; sorry again, what's wrong with me, bubonic plague or what else makes you avoid me? Both will be acting out their own fear to find themselves where you are now: helpless and in pain, gasping for meaning, unable to make the ends meet. 

Now maybe one, just one will simply sit with you through the darkest hours of the night, dealing with nothing, offering no advice or remedy; in silence linking you to the rest of humanity.