Last ed. 8/5/23, 11:01
The symptom is the route to the cure; the particular linguistic or cognitive configuration in which the affective complex arises is the theatre for its narrative resolution. We must be with what we have, while striving toward what we must be: this is the logic of transcendence and immanence as one God. So if the stage is set in the concentration of this or that plateau - say, ‘I still miss her’, ‘I am still scared of public speaking’ or ‘I still feel I have to impress them’ - then we must attend to that plateau, for this is (paradoxically) the means by which we keep our eyes on the universal horizon. The immanent and transcendent are not two separate avenues, but are the intertwined, revolving, coinherent singularity of the One True God, and any delving into one reveals the absolute presence of the other, and the dynamic interplay - the musical counterpoint - between them. So, as Augustine reminds us, we must become ever more ourselves in order to become ever more like God.
Thus I must confess that, contrary to many theologians of the past, I do not much care for a clear segregation between, broadly speaking, a ‘way of affirmation’ and ‘way of negation’ - that is, the way of community, creation, artistry; of Leah, and the way of anchoritism, isolation, solemnity; of Rachel. Does the monk truly live apart from the clergyman? From the layman? Are we not risking a kind of Marcionism by suggesting such a thing?
I know this to be immensely important not least because it was one of the first truly brilliant insights which occurred to my younger mind, though it lacked the scholarship it would eventually (and still will) come to know in order to situate and express it. At the time I distinguished between ‘bliss’ and ‘euphoria’, or ‘being-without-event’ and ‘event-atop-being’ - two modes of relation to God, drawn entirely from the rich and rough mines of uncut personal experience, encountered in certain moments of sacred conspicuousness, when my quietude would momentarily take leave of its melancholy, and reveal the very end after which my heart so pined. God - the God of the still, small, whisper and the God of the thundercloud, smiling at me with affection as the perfect Father, at times striding forth in dazzling glory, inspiring awe in the face of timorous darkness, and at others deigning to gently stoop and cradle me when I longed for his presence, reassuring me with the eternal and unwavering promise that I was and thus I was loved. Look how these metaphors are living! The education of the child is everything! Listen: this must be known, if nothing else. When the wind livens the trees of a warm summer night, when the party’s music has faded into the distance and the stars begin to sparkle in the inky firmament above, you are being cradled by the immortal God. I mean nothing more literally than this. This is literality itself. When in the heat of that party, when the nostalgic music is pulsing through your body and the joy is already preserved as cherished memory, you are beholding and participating in the glory of the immortal God.
Come now - why do we make these mistakes, when we fail to recognise this? Because we are bad at English!
We sit by a lake, and pray to God, and say in our hearts and minds that what we want is for some great (Biblical) miracle to occur, for Christ in flowing white with punctured hands to sit beside and speak, as real as you or me. We want the water to stand aside at Mosaic touch, we want the trees to bend and bow like Joseph’s sheaves, we want the sky to redden and earthy corpses to rise from still graves. Wounded children that we are...
When I was younger, I used to be unable to sleep because I was scared of monsters and ghosts. The silhouettes of Weeping Angels or some such terror, vanishing only at the command of the bedside lamp, but returning as soon as the darkness resumed. Some nights, when very young, I would go to join my parents, and sleep beside their protective comfort through the night. On others, my father would come in and explain to me that the Devil didn’t like it when good Christians prayed, and so if I prayed to God the Devil would make me go to sleep to try and stop me, so I could beat the Devil by praying to God. Sometimes this worked. At other times it was necessary to devise my own technique: I imagined three figures coming to stomp on the monster in my mind. The first was Doctor Who, the second was Optimus Prime, and the third was Jesus Christ. Why am I detailing this? Because this is my testimony of the same youthful error, the same error I see fully grown adults making on a quite consistent basis - very intelligent adults, mind you, adults intelligent enough to sit with a cigarette in their mouth in a café by the Seine and fashion a whole philosophy out of this error. The heroes of my fantasy, whichever name or form they happened to take, were employed in ritual utility. For the purposes of defeating the monster, Jesus and Optimus Prime were of perfectly equal use. My young heart was inclined toward them according to its need; I saw these particular symbols, this economy of dramatic conflict, a belligerence worthy of Johannine pen, cosmic light and cosmic darkness, all played out in the amphitheatre of my childish mind, resting on a cool pillow in the early hours of a quiet school night. These heroic and villainous metonyms for comfort and fear were employed because they were the language freely available to me, the means by which I would unknowingly express a longing beyond even all of these characters. When we are older, we are inclined to think we have matured beyond Optimus Prime, and as evidence we use our big words more freely; we talk about God and death and heaven and hell and meaning and absurdity and nihilism. But the very same process is at play, the same emotional particularity in which one believes that ‘these things’ make me happy whilst ‘these things’ make me sad, as though the latter were not nothing and the former were not everything. All of this supervenes upon and (when properly rendered, when the Fall is redeemed) exposes and elucidates the foundational fact that God Is, and only secondarily we are.
I am not, of course, precluding the possibility of more famous and salient forms of revelation: quite the opposite, I am rushing do to all I can to remove any strictures placed upon the nature of His manifestation to creation, cognisant of the deficient terms set in advance by us poor English students. These are the terms which see the metaphors - both in lived creation and in Scripture (which is quite unique: a collection of sacred metaphor, twice removed from God by means of its ‘literal’ textuality, and yet twice closer to Him than anything else in creation by means of its actual meditation on Him - by merit of its relinquishment of direct naming, of earthly ‘literality’, by merit of its self-recognition. The Bible knows well what it is; fundamentalists enforce upon it something of a mistaken identity...) - confused with, and thus ultimately obfuscating the meaning of, the work as a whole and its Writer. As long as we sit in melancholy, and yearn for a God as a thing amongst things, a desideratum amidst the fold, we are reading the text poorly. We are fundamentalists of reality; we are what the postmoderns would rightly condemn as ‘essentialists’.
I hope you do not mistake these for jokes: I am deadly serious, as serious as a joyful man can be. Children sit in English class, and they learn what a ‘metaphor’, and ‘simile’ are. They learn how these great poets whose names they hardly care for use these things, and thus make language beautiful. ‘Yes, yes’, thinks the child. ‘Enough of this Shakespeare nonsense. When’s break time?’ And so the child goes home, and longs for their father and mother to come and tuck them in, and kiss them goodnight, and so presumes these two realms to be different worlds. They can hardly be blamed; once the popular children find Shakespeare boring, then all hope really is lost for the Bard. ‘Class is boredom, break time is freedom’, so the motto runs in the collective mind. But we do not rectify our error. We grow up, our desires persist, and we have thought of them separate from language from the outset, so now find ourselves utterly heartbroken by their disparity from language. When I cry out for God to comfort me as the eternal Father, why does He not tangibly hold me as my earthly father does, I wonder? When I ask to see Her before me as the immortal Mother, why does She not visibly manifest as my earthly mother does, I wonder? But He does; more tangibly, more visibly, more literally than any earthly thing that you have ever loved! This is not a metaphor.
Listen. This is not a metaphor. Your mother, your father, your friend, your lover, your physical, tangible world: these are the metaphors. But what is it that persists through all of them? What is it that they intimate in their small fragments of love? What is their referent?
Being.
And it is this that holds you eternally.
This is not a metaphor. What is physicality? What are the actual metaphysics behind getting a hug? Behind seeing the sun rise in the east and set in the west? These mediums by which you demand God reveal Himself, and despair helplessly if He does not conform to your stifling, tearful, desperate commands. These are not ideas, my friend. They cannot be. You are, and so all acts of true being - all hugs, all kisses, all smiles, all laughter - are just shades of Being itself, signifiers of the eternal Love.
You fear existential absurdity, even nihilism, if you do not have your mighty clap of thunder and imperious voice from the cloud - your ‘proof’, so defined. You would even suffer Job’s ordeal to see this. My son, wipe your tears. Breathe out. Relax your hunched shoulders, your pained face. It is time to stop punishing yourself with these misguided necessities, these arbitrary stipulations which tell nothing of God, and serve only to harm yourself. The cruel irony of it all, of course, is that you and I both know that were this to happen, it would be nothing but momentary wonder, soon overcome by the scepticism predominating your mind by merit of the sickness of your heart. Let us be clear: you have been demanding an intellectual proposition, not God. Even if you were to see Him as you claim to desire, you would not have crossed the qualitative divide. A particular revelation, a particular miracle, is nothing if not already enfolded by the broader scope of the universal Being in which it manifests. Wittgenstein has shown us: Christians could be presented with irrefutable historical truth of resurrection, and this would still not guarantee faith. You have been fixated on an illusion, and made yourself utterly miserable over its nonreality. You have been demanding a God who is created: this is simply not what He is, and neither what you truly want Him to be.
I promise you: to fall into Love is to feel all of these things a thousand times over, and a thousand times greater. I have not used them as poetic image, not as metaphor which shall vanish the moment you ascertain - Love is the interior (the literal) logic of all such things, the very reason you so long for them, the very reason they mean anything to you at all. And they are never dispensed with. God never disdains the good of his creation.
So this is the Fall of childhood: to mistake this metaphorical, textual, poetic world for its Author.
We wallow in sadness because we cannot find Him as a particular image in the piece: but we ourselves are metaphors for God - so what need we do to find Him except simply fall into ourselves?
Just be, and know that God is Love.
So what are these arid classroom poets showing us? What are they pointing to? Are they really, my son, pointing away from football and tag at break time? Away from the goodnight kiss from mother? Away from the nervous butterflies when you catch the pretty girl’s eye across the dining hall...? Come now.
S