I seem to be tackling too much these days, and I attribute that to the 'flu.  Yesterday, the blog dug into spirit, St Augustine, and social theory, each one bringing numerous possibilities and directions worthy of a dissertation by a really smart person. Today, the same seems to have happened - a topic surfaced that is probably beyond my depth.  And yet, there it is, and it wants to be addressed.

It is about Job, the proper servant of Jehovah who was visited by every tragedy and blight known to man, and the thought about him occurred on my morning walk to get the newspaper, without warning.  "Job," a voice said to me, "is an allegory, not about the mysterious nature of God, but about the happiness of humans.  It seems easy to be happy when all is going well - but that is not the case.  Whether with wealth or without, there is no happiness without the recognized presence of God within."  

Ah, I got it!  But when I tried to explain it to my wife, she dissented - "it's all about him, isn't it?  What about the women and children who die for his edification?"  

It is true - but the story is not to be seen as a reflection of a real-life man, but as a subliminal message - that God's presence is all that really matters.  Logically and literally, this does not hold for the story - it seems rather about a petty and even vindictive god who wishes to torture someone just to extract his most abject love.  But in its depths, it is about the suffering of one over the loss of his stuff - and how, in the end, it is the continued love of God that brings back joy (in the allegory, the return of all his stuff, including, incredibly, many wives and children).  Stuff, prestige, the whole lot of man, we come to learn, cannot bring permanent joy.  They - and we - all go, rot, become ill, die.  Only the presence of God remains, and it is only through this that true and timeless joy is achieved.  

It IS about God taking away everything - but that is how the world works, not just with Job but with everything and everyone.  It is the unarguable fact of life.  But who is there for Job after all it gone?  And when Job realizes this, joy returns (again, all his stuff and family comes back, as an allegory).  And yes, it IS about testing one's faith, but not in a vindictive way.  We are all lolled into believing at one time or another that we are sitting pretty.  It is then that it is easy either to say we love God, or that we do not need God at all.  But Job shows us that everything - the good and the bad - will end - all that, except God; and so it is that it is only through "IT" that eternal happiness can be found.

It is a message, an allegory, of not only faith, but of truth - which is not what it seems at first sight at all.  How did I miss that? What else am I missing?

The longstanding 'flu is gone at last, and perhaps my thoughts are returning to normal.  But what good is that if I miss the easiest of things?  What can I do to find these things, but to wait for the greater meaning to come from God knows where?  Job learned how to wait with infinite patience in his new-found faith. In allegory, he might have been one of the luckiest man to have lived.  FK                  

Last night I had a not-so unusual dream, given the news: I was on an airliner that was obviously going down for a deadly crash. Sitting in my cramped space, I of course was overcome with anxiety as the plane came within yards of the ground.  Then I just huddled, thinking, "it will be over with fast.  There will be no pain. Just let it go."  Although still bracing for the impact, I became relaxed.  There was nothing I could do about it.  I let it go.
With that, I had a strong sense of the spirit, of the eternal - that this gig on earth wasn't all there was.  It was, in the end, peaceful.

I didn't die, though, and the dream careened on towards the ridiculous - the plane made an emergency landing, and women in high heels jumped from one rooftop of a gas station to another to get enough gas to refuel.  The dream fell from the sublime to the idiotic faster than the plane.

But there was a sense of spirit, something I am so familiar with that I take for granted.  Reading the introduction to "The Confessions of St. Augustine" yesterday, I learned that this was not the case with the ancient Romans.  The Greeks, from Plato, had a well - honed sense of spirit (that later merged with Jewish theology to create Christianity), but the Romans did not; rather, they thought that a god must have corporeal existence.  For this reason, Augustine clung at first to the Manichean doctrine, which sought to explain evil in the world by posing the duel forces of creation: that good made the universe, and evil invaded it. Therefore, the things of the world should be avoided, right down to procreation (which creates more material things).  To stop evil, we must not give it, in material form, any power over ourselves.  

I did not learn all the complexities of this religion, which was, even then, considered an abomination, but the crux of it for Augustine was this: that he could not at first understand that humans could generate evil in a world that was made from a perfectly good God.  That is, he could not at first see that it was not God who made evil in this world, but ourselves; and that, as God was spirit, he was not part of the evil that existed in His world.  God, then, could be both perfect and all - good even as His world was filled with evil.  

In his 32nd year, Augustine realized his 'error' and became one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time.  Still, it came to me as a surprise, for primitive peoples often seem to dwell more in the world of spirit than this one.  What happened to the Romans that they should so deviate?  And if they could do so, could it be that spirit is, as a modern materialist would say, a product of our imagination?  And if so, then not only good but also evil could be only an illusion, making of the world (the universe) a set of bio-chemical and natural laws that have no purpose but for the accidental creation of something that means nothing; for without spirit, there is no meaning in the universe.  Certainly, science and religion must collide here.

In the late 19th century, Max Weber attacked this problem with something akin to sheer genius, for his approach was, as far as I know, absolutely original.  Forget about philosophical truth, he said; instead, look at the matter of "spirit" as a sociological problem.  God or the gods and spirits, he said, were made from the sense of community of small, tribal groups from the past. That is, that ultimately, what the primitives came to worship (and we who followed them) was a sense of themselves as a community. It was nothing more or less than group self-love.  Modern society ("modern" meaning compartmentalized) broke with this sense of community and for that reason we have come to abandon more and more notions of God, as well as a sense of communal togetherness.  Thus we have developed the modern ailment of anomie, a profound sense of alienation.  We have lost our god because we have lost a sense of community.

Still, this does not answer the ultimate questions: from where did this spirit of community come from?  Is this not the very spirit of the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, that Christians speak of, this thing of community? Is this not the basis for love?  And how is it, then, that something of the imagination could become powerful enough to pull groups, and even whole nations together? 

Mass movements are not always from the spirit of what many today consider to be that of God - Jim Jones is a particularly lurid example of that.  Of course, modern religions do understand that there is an evil spirit that is active in the world - and assume that this spirit is an aberration of our free will against an all-good God. Here, all the questions about spirit are still not answered (to say the least).  Yet, there is little doubt, from sociological evidence, that spirit exists in the world.  But couldn't it be Manichean in form, dual spirits of good and evil that are equally powerful?  

Or perhaps it is up to us - to form a god among ourselves that reflects an ultimate God of love and unity.  Augustine is recognized as one of the great minds of the last 2 thousand years.  Perhaps he will have the answer.  Or perhaps, as is usual, it will again fall to faith.  But goodness we know, and spirit we feel.  It is at the very least a beginning for anyone.  FK  

             


                 

(Note - I will be posting another chapter of Hurricane River in the next few days.)

Last night was spent in front of the TV watching Wisconsin pull off a close one in the Sweet Sixteen, but the night before was given to no greater a task: finally, the last of the Hobbit trilogy was available on CD, and we watched it with glee.  Just as suspected from its subtitle, "The Five Armies," much of it was given over to action, but it was good action, epic action: the action of mythical heroes.  At the end of the film I let the credits roll and listened to the made- for- movie music and wished that it were not over.  I wanted another.  I did not want the fantasy to end.  

Why I, why many of us love fantasy is no mystery: fantasy gives us great adventure in a story with great meaning.  In fantasy, we do not sit bored in front of the TV and worry about our jobs or slowly dwindle with age; no, our lives in fantasy land are worth it, part of a fate that makes us greater than ourselves.  In our regular reality, in this little corner of the universe, we come to believe that we are nothing; but in fantasy we share the broad picture of fate at large, of magical forces that  turn the cosmos on the head of a pin, on our own heads, on our own actions.  In fantasy, we mean something. There, we are part of an Age, every bit as great as the movement of armies in ancient history - better, really, because we come to know that there is a hidden meaning behind it all, that which forms the fabric of the fantasy universe.  

In, reality I would be frozen in terror in front of the demonic Orks, and would shake uncontrollably if I were forced to scale a razor's edge cliff to get to the magical destination.  But it does not take too much thought to understand that, even in our prosaic cowardice, we are involved in a great 'fantasy' that surpasses that of Tolkien.  It is life, plan and simple life.  It is not just that we do not know from where we come or to where we go, which is mystery enough; but that the so-called little things of our lives also form the head of the pin on which the universe turns.  We live the big things, too, those things of history called world wars and plagues and social disruption; but with some thought, we can see that even our small things are not so small after all.  We bring life from nothing, we fight death like the gods of Asgard, and just like them we are doomed; and in our fight, each one of us plays the hero of villain or coward, likely all three, and in no small way at that.  Our actions or inactions ripple through ourselves, our families, our friends, our community, and on and on to no one knows where.

In Tolkien's works, there is never a mention of God or gods; this is left rather to the unspoken author of fate, for all the stories are fated. This is what gives fantasy its sense of importance, of meaning.  But it is no hard thing to see that fate, or the names we have given to it (God, gods, divine force, karmic law, will of heaven) is active in our lives both individually and collectively. This, this life is a miracle; this, this life follows a plan, one which we can only begin to see in hindsight. Like magic in the fantasy world, we do not understand how it is, and why it is, but it is, and it is only our doughty thoughts, our very Hobbit-like sense of social order, that keeps us from grasping that our lives are impossible marvels. 

Fantasy is really over-simplified life, or life made simple.  It borrows all the big stuff from life, but packs it into a book or story that lets us see the whole thing in small time.  We love it because it is simple, and long for it because it gives us the sense of the heroic that we need in real life but cannot see, for real life is too complex to grasp. But if we look back with a little bit of thought and we can see that each of us is going to battle at the magic mountain in our own time, and that each of us is accosted and consoled by the small and great and magical all along the way. This is something we will all see in the end, for sure.  

Until then, I will continue to love my fantasy stories.  But I hope to see what is true in them: that they are just cardboard cutouts of the real thing, simple analogies to help us grasp the greater magical essence of life.  FK       
 

Thanks to Cal Roeker for the comment.  I agree that it is a dangerous thing to throw out the organically built cultural template, but that is exactly what we are doing.  My thesis was not that it should be done, but that in so doing, it might have a silver lining.  I like to think of sudden culture change in terms of the introduction of a random mutation in the gene pool.  In the vast majority of cases, it is detrimental.  And yet, these are essential for species change, which may be necessary in times of great climatic shifts.  Cultures are more flexible than genes, but certain elements do hold together with others, and the collapse of one might cause the collapse of others, just as a defective kidney will negatively effect the body as a whole.  With culture,we are not shooting in the dark, as cosmic rays do when altering DNA, but often nearly so.  We are, in a sense, more dependent on fate than we might wish to think.  It is a time for good thoughts, to say the least.

On a different note, I came to the end of Thomas Merton's "The Sign of Jonas" last night, and the last 100 pages were tremendously insightful and poetic.  From one point, Merton made clear what "sin" really is: the obfuscation of our clear reflection of God.  As I read it, sin is not so much the deed as the outlook, or impulse for the deed, the latter only being a reflection of our blindness to our divine nature.  Nothing new, but put in a new way that was immediately accessible.  Still, the way to "clarity" is just as difficult as ever, as Merton himself shows; after 11 years in a monastery, he still frets about his sinfulness.

New to me, however, was his view on God as the "invisible" - that is, on why God can never be fully grasped.  The key, he says, is the Freedom of God and the freedom He gave to His creation. This, combined with God's completeness - He does not need His creation or anything else - contribute to His inaccessibility. Merton explains how, just as soon as he feels the presence of God, it is gone.  This presence always comes when not expected, never on command, flowing as the wind and just as un-graspable.  He is in nature, but NOT nature, in Man, but NOT man, in our thoughts but NOT our thoughts.  Free; just as we are told in the Bible that God will set us free if we follow His commandments and, later, the Gospels.  And the paradox is, this freedom can only be reached by the rejection of what we think we want - those things of the world and society that are not things of freedom, but of enslavement.  

What we would do with this freedom is again up for grabs - nearly anything, it seems, just as long as it is done in freedom, in the will of God which is the only freedom.  This is much like Buddhist philosophy - that freedom from desire is ultimate freedom - and, although Merton did not know it at the time, it should come as no surprise that in his later years, he became fascinated with Buddhism, and in fact died of a faulty electrical switch while in Thailand, if I remember correctly. 

But that is a long way from his monastery in Kentucky.  At this point, finishing the book, he has spent 11 long years, from his late 20's to his late 30's, living the life of a monk, and what he has learned is this: that God is ultimate freedom.  In this, he has to resort to poetry, for it cannot be explained in plain speech. Freedom is the language of eternity, and it has always been won at tremendous cost to the average human.  It is beyond us, but still within a fleeting grasp, like God - like the wind, which comes and goes as it will.  FK                           

This weekend I read an unusual article that was put forward in the Yahoo face page from the Financial Times.  The title was something like, "What the Knights Templar can tell us about defeating ISIS," which it used in an interesting play of political science theory.  The Knights, the author explains, were non-national, held together by ideological rather than national ties, which dove-tailed nicely with the power structure of the Islamic countries during the period of the Crusades (about 1100 to 1300). The point was: to combat a non-national, ideological entity like ISIS, we need a similar force that is ideological and meta-national.  The author did not mention a Christian entity like the Knights, and now that I think about it, really didn't put a finger on exactly who that group might be. 

But while discussing it, he made an even better point by exposing the limited nature of today's nation-states: that is, that they satisfy or seek to satisfy a demand for consumer goods, but offer little else. In so doing, they have left those starving for meaning in life to join groups such as ISIS, which fills both the spiritual and social vacuum left by the modern state.  

What a shockingly deep and clear point to be made in a political essay!  It is, from my perspective, stunningly accurate as well.  In a purview of current nations, which among them offers its members the key to the meaning and importance of life?  The Marxist ideologies tried and failed miserably, and now there seems little else to fill that big vacuum but GDP and how many cheap goods - or government entitlements - we can manage to get in our lifetime.  With such a vacuum, it is then not surprising that young men run off to join conquerors who claim to be the hand of God's will.  We only have to wait for an equal and opposite reaction to that.  But what might that be?  And which state could possibly allow it?  

In the USA, the government was not supposed to offer purpose - rather, it was to exist only to allow individuals to pursue their own purposes.  And yet, there has been a constant downgrading of centralizing purposes in our nation, as well as most nations globally.  Religion is now seen as a private affair, so much so that even to express it outside of its church or temple box is to invite ridicule.  Ideology?  We are left with the tatters of Marxism and soft venues such as environmentalism. Social cohesion?  We are supposed to be open to the world now, and are chided for cultural specificity as if that is racist (which it generally is not) or ethnocentric (which it might be - but what coherent culture is not?).  We are left, then, with nothing in the center, nothing to hold us together as either social units or souls.  And the lunacy of Islamic fundamentalist murders continue.  

While writing my memoir, "Dream Weaver," a certain chapter forced me to think about this - about how America in particular was rapidly becoming only a multi-cultural shopping mall, and in this I found a hidden strength.  In the world of the shaman or the mystic, to reach the goal of Truth, one must first be stripped of all previous ties and conceptions, to pass painfully through the famed "Dark Night of the Soul."  And so it might be for America and perhaps for the rest of the world.  Perhaps having a center, as ISIS members now believe they do, is not always a good thing. Perhaps every now and then, we must be left bereft, to find a deeper truth than we had previously believed.  It could just be, then, that what looks like the end to many of us is really the beginning of something far better than we can now imagine.  

What that would look like would be interesting to explore, but one thing is for sure - we do not have all the time in the world to find it.  In a vacuum, those with any ideas will outlast those with none, and some of the ideas moving people today are not of the highest moral caliber.  God comes to the mystic when He will; hopefully, He will come to the rest of us when He must.  FK     


   

Today, a new chapter in ".Hurricane River" under the same name in the website.  It is "Derek.," after "The Law."  FK

Today, a new essay under "Essays" in the website - "Ghost People."  Written as the flu was beginning to pounce, it is not the most light-hearted and beautiful ever done, but it gets to the point without frills.  Kind of like the flu.  FK

A short one today, as at last a virus has decided to make me miserable, just on the cusp of spring.  

But it was because of this lassitude that we watched a movie last night, one that we had recorded last time HBO gave away freebies -  "Monument Men."  Given that it has such a star-studded cast, with George Clooney and John Goodman and Bill Murray, among others, it was surprisingly mediocre.  It was also not up to the task of its theme - about a group of men who really did go into Europe at the end of WWII to save artwork from the Nazis and the USSR.  While it did present arguments for the preservation of the great artworks, most were from a cultural perspective; that is, that such art shows the very best of the Western cultural heritage and is therefore worth saving, even (as Harry Truman in the movie questioned) at the expense of some soldier's lives.  

But the very nature of the vast majority of the great art saved simply begs us to question this more deeply, for they were religious works, works that labored to and succeeded in transcending their culture to affect a holy presence or feeling. The art, then, was not about saving cultural history, but about saving the footprints of God in people.  Great art until the last century was almost always about the sacred.  And great art of the modern era still, in my opinion, must also raise us to a higher spiritual level. Most art today does not - and most is not appreciated or even known by the general public, and in this the public is right.  

What the Monument Men were saving were the vestiges of a time when the sacred was taken as a public trust.  Today, such works would make the artistic set cringe.  Why this is so is, too me, a difficult and complex historical problem, although the traditional Perennialists believe they already have the answer: that we are in the last stages of a vast human decline, and on the eve of destruction.  This I cannot confirm or deny, but this much is true: Hollywood seems to not want to touch this subject with a ten foot pole, and Hollywood is our maven of popular culture.  While the sacred continues to affect people, it must now be done in a private manner, not in public art, and with this, popular culture has lost its sacred footing.  Popular art has become the art of the senses or of the psychological, where the individual might feel a superficial kinship.  Still, though -  as I looked at the art that these people were saving in the movie, I felt the thrill and transcendent power in them of the sacred.  As the actors stood back to marvel in them, this is what they wished to express.  But this could not be shared openly.  It had to be put in the context of individual genius and history.

All this was set during WWII, where the greatest destructive powers ever known, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, fought to steal the sacred art of the West for anything but the sacred. Instead, they wished to own it and lock it up.  And perhaps that is what we have done today - set such works in museums or cathedrals that are seen and visited as museums, not as living images that bring us, together, to the sacred.  

Monuments Men; monuments are for dead things, and perhaps for our time they got the name just right.  FK  

       

        

Today, a new chapter in the book "Hurricane River" under the same name in the website.  The chapter is "The Law."  FK

Last night at about 10:30, I had just put my book down and was about to go downstairs to bed, when the phone rang.  A call that late usually meant it would be from one of two people, and it was: from my son, calling from college.  He was out of breath, as he was walking the mile to campus from where he has to park his car, and he was mad.  He had just been to a mandatory lecture for a mandatory class on Diversity, and he explained the situation: after a monologue on "white privilege," questions were asked from the audience.  As he got up to speak, he was told by the lecturer to "shut up and sit down and listen," and at that, only "minority" attendees were allowed to speak, talking about the harshness and unfairness of living in "white" America.  It was not so much what they said that made him mad, but the attitude - he, as a "privileged" person had no right to an opinion, for surely his opinion was tainted with white privilege and therefore worthless.

This is not a political blog, and I do not raise this issue for the sake of this issue.  Rather, it shows how often violence, whether current or historical, leads to violence (emotional or physical) - which leads to more violence and so on.  It is the greatest sorrow in the world.

I have often questioned the pacifist religions here in this blog - not to say that they are wrong, but to put forth their apparent paradox.  For instance, it is hard to deny that a pacifist people or nation will sooner or later become a slave people or nation.  Such has been the lesson of history, corroborated by personal examples: the bully will keep on bullying until the bullied fight back. How can one survive in this world as a pacifist? On the other hand, over the course of time, the aggressors are met by the growing ranks of the oppressed, and they, too, are annihilated or oppressed.  It may take a while - for Rome, it took about 800 years, but it does seem that what goes around comes around.  But that does not end violence; instead it changes the locus of violence to a new people or geography.  The cycle of violence never stops.  

So, how to end it?  As I know Christianity best, I will use this philosophy as an example, and its answer is simple: turn the other cheek.  Meet violence with peace and brotherhood.  Treat everyone as you would have yourself be treated. 

Madness.  But how else to stop the cycle?  That is why I have asked,"who will be brave enough take that first step?"  Certainly not me.  But we are forced to see the wisdom, for without taking that first step - a step that will most likely lead to martyrdom or worse - the misery will continue, and, as Thomas Merton said, the last man on earth with the last bomb will not be able to resist the temptation to blow it off.  We will be compelled to destroy ourselves.

If one were unusually gifted with divine insight, what other solution could one offer?  We do now certainly understand, as people before us did not, that we are all spiritual equals, each one deserving certain unalienable rights.  With a little more insight, many of us also understand that our enemies are more often than not our shadow - and that in fighting them, we are doing a type of violence to ourselves. And yet - certain people and nations are demonstrably evil.  Do we sit back and let them do their evil things, which inevitably will affect us all?  

Yet again, in this we do not stop the cycle.  Too often, as my son learned, the formerly oppressed do not seek peace after victory but revenge.  Christ and the great sages of the east understood this, and called for one or another form of passivity - or at the very least, victory without triumph, the end of oppression without more oppression.  

It is in the latter where it seems the best possibility lies, but can we do it? Can we, to rework the Lord's Prayer, forgive our trespassers (after the evil of hostile trespass has been stopped) so that they might forgive us?  Can we realize such equanimity? Or must we really go all the way, to complete pacifism and martyrdom, to save the world?   

Perhaps there is room for both, the one buttressing and keeping alive the other - the pacifists keeping the peace makers from turning to vengeance, giving us justice and real forgiveness and peace, all at once.  This approach walks the razor's edge, but it seems we are doing that already, with no end in sight.  FK