Men: prisoners of the
coulds and woulds and shoulds and cans and mights and mays, of the isms and the
osophies and the ologies.
The manifestations of
charismata have always been troublesome for the church. Paul, whose own
experience of God was certainly not ordinary, counseled nonetheless against
speaking in tongues and similar displays of excess. The madness of Pentecost
was the church's birthday celebration; immediately thereafter the disciples
were exhorted to sobriety, and the institutionalization began which has
proceeded apace ever since. By the middle ages, the man who burned too brightly
in public with a spiritual flame was likely also to burn publicly with a
temporal one. The meaning here is clear: like any other living entity (so runs
the law of this world) God is better understood neatly classified, neatly
contained. But the spirit listeth where it will, and instances of the divine
madness are perhaps not so rare even in our own day as is commonly supposed,
Many cases, I am sure, escape the scrutiny of the theologians as well as that
of their secular counterparts, the psychiatrists.
These things begin
innocently enough. Life is full of pitfalls, camouflaged snares strewn
throughout the various paths and byways of existence for no particular purpose
except perhaps to fulfill some secret design in the unfathomable uncertainty
which men style God. The exchange of glances between strangers on a streetcar
or a bus, a chance encounter with an old friend, a rose, an apple, a passage in
a book: any of these will serve to initiate a chain of events that moves a man
out of his accustomed routine, out of the habits with which he disguises his
unconsciousness, and into a circumstance inexplicable and devastating that
brings him to the moment of recognition at which life begins to work its
elusive miracle, for good or ill. What must be stressed above all else is the
ordinary character of such events. Rarely does any event, ultimately dramatic,
ultimately overwhelming, begin in a dramatic way. There is perhaps a
psychological law operative here, some secret protective process of the soul
designed to prevent fear from always and inevitably accomplishing its
life-destroying work.
Increasingly, our
communications become soliloquies: in the annals of intergalactic history that
will one day note our passing we will perhaps be referred to as 'the race that
talked to itself.' This colloquial identification will aid future students in
remembering us for the few hours that intervene between the cram session and
the examination. Doubtless we will be the subject of a great many research
papers and learned dissertations. Some poor creature, attracted
perhaps by the quaintness of our mores, will make us his life's study. If his
work is of sufficient quality our immortality will be assured; otherwise, we
will become the footnote that we seem intent on convincing ourselves we have
always been. A study in inconsequence.
Every intuition of
energy is an intuition of the human soul, a broken glance backward over the shoulder
of time toward the first shock of creation, when god slowed the energic dance
that was his thought and began his experiment with matter. (I am able to muster
considerable enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist.)
False gods are no rare
phenomenon. Indeed, throughout the long history of our uneasy sojourn on this
fragile atom they have far outnumbered any gods who could lay even the most
remote claim to being true, to true Being. Witness the
divinities of dim antiquity, a veritable menagerie of godforms ---
caprine, bovine, anguine, canine, leonine, ursine, taurine, feline, lupine,
ibidine. Nor did the anthropomorphizing Greeks much improve upon their
predecessors, bestowing upon posterity a pantheon chiefly characterized by the
common humanity of its collective vices, a rogue's gallery of gods the central
divinity of which is today remembered chiefly as a prime example of the ravages
attendant upon overactive glands. It is a longstanding perversity of our nature
to enshrine the worst, to apotheosize the mediocre and the criminal, and if the
intellectual development of the race has somewhat diminished our taste for gods
of any order, enervating them without distinction, reducing them
indiscriminately to the level of the myth and the fairy tale, it has not
succeeded thereby in obviating our appetite for the banal and the beastlike.
Rare today the cenobite consuming locusts and sanctity in the wilderness, the
god-stunned anchorite living a life of intense spiritual selfishness in some
monastery deleted by severe discipline from the temporal and the compound:
modes of existence rendered obsolete by the wider monasticism of
vulgar thought imposed by this common age, the service of the new, aseptic
gods.
The unexamined life is
not worth living. The old adage pops unbidden to mind. It seems
somehow tired in this electric age, reared to escape self examination.
What tempts me to this enterprise, what prevents it? The times have diffused my
thought, shortened my attention span, clipped my capacity for meditation.
Tonight I drank wine, ate dinner, had coffee, smoked, did the dishes, helped
with the laundry, talked to my wife, talked to my son, watched television.
Tomorrow night I will drink wine, eat dinner, have coffee, smoke, do the
dishes, talk to my wife, talk to my son, watch television. A lifetime of meals
stretches ahead of me, gallons upon great unnumbered gallons of wine beat like
ceaseless tides against the shoreline of my future. I will speak myself hoarse,
I will break my eyesight on a cathode tube. Earnest in the preservation of this
bliss, I will bind my days to the clock, my weeks to the paycheck, my months to
the mortgage, my years to strict routines. I will wrap my dreams in oilcloth
and store them in the attic beside a pair of boots two decades aged that I
could not bear to throw away.
An overwhelming
sadness attends this distance from God. I remember fondly the simpler
certainties of my youth. God made us to know, love, and serve Him in this world
and to be happy with Him in the next. No doubt, cankerous and parasitic,
attached to these facts. The lost tridentine sonorities, wreathed in incense,
buoyed by chant, seemed to my childish understanding as absolute and as
mysterious as the laws of physics. Like the laws of physics, they were the
unfathomable ciphers of forces beyond comprehension that served despite their
impenetrability to keep the world from flying off unglued in all directions.
Our first church was a small, dark, low-ceilinged building across from
the school, an old tavern that had been wrested from profanity by the sheer
bullying, bellowing will of a fire-and-brimstone Irish priest. It was not
impossible to sit there and think of gravity. Indeed, in certain moments of dim
solemnity, gravity seemed a natural subject for meditation. Was not ours a God
Who walked on water, ascended into the air, and would return riding on the
clouds?
On Elites: Without
elites there is no meritocracy. Without meritocracy, democracy fails. We have
no royalty. Therefore we must promote elites of conscience. We must conscript
them.
These are disconsolate
meditations, connected by the frailest tendons, their discomfort assuaged only
by the fiction of the first person plural. But if we speak as though our voice
comes from a great distance it is not because we seek to frame a dispassionate
style (it is dis-passion
that we seek to escape) but rather because these broken fragments are the
stirrings of a mute spirit struggling to congeal into an "I",
beginning the pilgrimage of merit whose reward is a voice cohesive, flammable,
and immediate.
What is the experience of
grace? This instantaneous and certain apprehension and this only: all my sins
forgiven, all my loves sanctified.
Not without reason is
silence considered one of the hallmarks of sanctity. It is the saint's
particular calamity to have seen God. In the face of that one great Assertion,
the saint comes to know that assertion is futile, that nothing on this earth
speaks meaningfully save perhaps the passage of the seasons, that to speak, to
utter, to declare, to assert, to mouth even a single halting syllable is not
only to retard the soul's ascent but perhaps to blaspheme as well. Far from
being a matter of humility, a discipline imposed by the holy upon themselves,
this silence is the inevitable result of the encounter with the Unspeakable.
Ours is an age which
has lost the sense of God, the terrible fascination for the Divine which is
neither a habit of intelligence nor a surrender to superstition but rather a
natural facility for living at certain levels of our being. Whether our anxiety
is the result or the cause of our having lost this sense is difficult to
determine, and, in either case, it is probable that it does not matter. Like
the saint, we too hesitate to make assertions about God, but our hesitance
derives not from an intuition of his terrible immediacy but, on the contrary,
from the confusion which results from our insistence on the immediacy of the
world. Unable to sever the umbilicus which holds us to the womb of matter, we collapse
into Reality. Unable to surrender our wills and be reborn,
we collapse into the vacuity from which we so lately arose and will ourselves
instead unborn into the world.