Again, in Morris West's "The Clowns of God," I am confronted with the reason I seldom read fiction.  All but the best have at least a hint of the contrived, where the resolution to the plot is already set and the characters are almost comically wooden.  The best, on the other hand, are usually classics, culled from the rest over the decades, but often containing situations or conflicts that are now out of date.  I know more recent good ones are out there, but they are so hard to find.  

"The Clowns of God" is not one of the good ones.  It is contrived, and the events, taken only from the concerns of 1980 (when it was published), already seem passe.  We have the Soviet Union and threats of nuclear holocaust, we have the Red Brigade threatening the fabric of Italy and Germany, and a preoccupation with the End Times whose triggers almost seem quaint in comparison to what we have now - Jihad, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to smaller countries, Ebola, border problems, and new and improved international lawlessness, such as Putin in Ukraine.  But it is not bad, either; the author has a tremendous knowledge of theology and Vatican intricacies, and he makes some very valid theological points. 

 It is good enough, then, with its theological gems, that I continue to read.  In last night's reading, I came across a division among Christian theologians that was very familiar to me, although the terms used were new: whereas I have often talked of the cyclical, or perennial view versus the evolutionary view, here they call them "consummation" versus "continuity."  "Consummation" refers to the classic Christian end times where the world is devoured by plague and war and falling stars and everything, just before he Second Coming of Christ, where the elect are whisked away to heaven (or Earth is changed into a paradise for the elect).  "Continuity" refers to a more gradual change - progress, really, where humanity and God reach a new level of interaction that brings about a more gradual evolution towards a more perfect world, one in which most can and will participate.  So it has been a central theme of mainstream theology for some time! (perhaps since the early 20th century, with the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin).  Most of us wish for "continuity" or evolution, while biblical fundamentalists would tell us that, regardless of what we would like, thus it is written.  

Central to much of this, both as it is being revealed in the novel and as it has been discussed in theological circles, is free will; are we as individuals only deluding ourselves as to our free will?  Many would argue, including many psychologists, that free will is an illusion - that we are controlled by our genes and environment to such an extent that free will does not count at all.  This is in perfect alignment with the materialists, for to have free will sets us above nature, and how can a nature that is blind and circumstantial create beings that can rise above it?  But it also aligns with the perennialists - for them, free will is possible, but only with the subjugation of the ego through spiritual practice, something that is extremely difficult to do, as all people who have tried know.  The evolutionists know this, but believe that God is leading us on, helping us attain a level where such an effort becomes possible for the average person.  And some of the fundamentalists agree - for it is Christ who has made this evolution possible.  That, too, is written.  
Perhaps I should not have denigrated the book so soon.  Perhaps we are being lulled by the appearance of a typical bestseller (most are formulaic, precisely to sell) and will be met with a greater truth about this than we know.  Perhaps we will be shown that the problem is best seen as something a friend once told me: we have to believe, we have to believe that we have a future where we can make things better.  Perhaps belief in something like the Christ helps us in this existential belief, and in this we can pull ourselves beyond the trap that is our quotidian life.  Could the doom of St John's apocalypse be rather the picture of an inner struggle, the fight of our primitive egoistic states with a spiritual movement?  In that, our hope might become our strength and insure our alignment with positive evolution, an evolution caused by free will that is aided by the benign guidance of Spirit.  FK                      

"Once you accept the existence of God - however you define Him, however you explain your relationship to Him - then you are caught forever with His presence in the center of all things.  You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage."   Morris West, "The Clowns of God."

It is summer, and with that I have gone to the fiction section of the library for somewhat lighter reading.  Of course, I was drawn to the above as I am always drawn to things spiritual or otherworldly, and was immediately struck with the opening quote from author Morris West, for what have I been doing these many years?  Indeed, once you have accepted the existence of God, His presence becomes the center of all things, and life becomes a spiritual pilgrimage with all its experiences, the bad being reconciled to the Good that is, that must be God.  

I am not far into the book, but we begin with this proposition: are "believers" insane?  We have a character, an atheist psychologist, who wishes to proclaim such, but, as she says, since she cannot disprove the existence of God, then she cannot comfortably call believers delusional.

And that goes to the heart of this blog and this website: to somehow confirm what we believers know to ourselves, and to expand that knowing to those who do not or cannot believe.  To many who do believe (but not all - some only are going along with what they have been taught), the existence of God is so close, so obvious, that it is nearly impossible to believe that others can't see it - and yet, just as impossible to convince those who cannot see.  Many who cannot, I know, feel the same way: how can otherwise intelligent and well-educated people believe in something that cannot be touched or seen or even smelled?  Well, yes, I can retort, I can see it in the flowers and the sun and the stars and touch it on the scales of fish or bark of a tree or smell it in honeysuckle and, yes, the stench of road kill on a hot summer road.  It is all "being" and being shouldn't be; one cannot whip it up in a lab, cannot assign it physical laws and checks and balances and, most of all, give it an everlasting energy, or nearly so.  

But those explanations are only for the skeptics.  Otherwise, there spirit is, showing up everywhere, in everything.  But that also leads to our metaphorical paintings on the cave of our spiritual pilgrimage.  We are caught in a tautology from which there is no escape: I believe because I know, and thus all things point to God.  But if I do not know, all things point to nothing.  There are no etchings on the cave, only the cold, hard surface of a geological accident.  Or so one might think.

In some of my essays, I attempt to show (I almost wrote "prove") otherwise. There is, for most, coincidence, synchronicities that show that something, some hidden relationship, is going on.  There are unexplained cures and rapport with spirits that tell us things that we cannot possibly know; there are flashes of the future that actually tell us the future; and there are, against all odds, prayers answered (and many more that go unanswered, but we look at the odds of those that do).  Still, might these someday be understood by a cold technology that has not yet been invented?  

The clearest proof of God (however one might think of it, and however one's relationship to it one might have), though, will remain within that sixth sense, that feeling of presence that is as close as the hair on one's head.  In the final  analysis, this knowledge of spirit is best grasped and transmitted by spiritual art, by the expression of the divine in the non-logical way of music or poetry or certain prose. This is our final and most substantial bridge to the divine, even though the feeling within the art apparently has no substance at all. But it does. None are immune to it, although many do not accept the spiritual implications that are often obvious.  This is their choosing, I think, a kind of willed blindness to natural human artistic sensibilities.  The etchings on the cave are not the work of fools or madmen or primitives.  Rather, they are human communications with the divine, however skillful or childish they may be.  Tell-tale signs of spirit lie all about us, but the most secure, the most immediate and intimate, are those signs that come from the human spirit through our art, from our inner being that links us with Spirit. Just as many have always known.  FK                    

Today, a new essay, "A Time to Die," under "Essays" in the website.  FK