In the lazy country summers of my youth, mid-to-late season was often visited by choruses of cicadas. By then, we were browned by the sun and foot-hardened by weeks without shoes and felt, without actively thinking about it, at one with nature. That feeling was echoed and solidified by the cicadas, whose day-long love songs penetrated far deeper than the hot sun, warming something inside that I could not then understand, but craved. I finally came to grasp the meaning of the mood when the “Acid Rock” era erupted in the mid-1960’s, especially through the epic “Sgt. Pepper’s” album put out by the Beatles. The album was spacey enough, but it was a small song by George Harrison that really did it, through the use of the sitar. There I found the magic of the cicadas, and there came to know what it meant: Nirvana, Godhead. The drone of the instrument excited the same feeling as the hum of the cicadas, which both brought about the deep sense of a united eternity.
It’s not easy to maintain a mood such as this, but I was struck with two artistic works these last two weeks that were able to do just that. One was the new Dune movie, whose advertisements promised us would not be the flop that earlier attempts at capturing the ethos of the Dune sci-fi series had been. They were right, although, just as with the hum of cicadas or the drone of the sitar (or bag pipes), the movie might not be for everyone. As with the cicadas, some might be annoyed at the slow (monotonous) progress made by the movie, which is to be understood. But not me.
The mood. It comes out in the background music, yes, but also in the majesty of the special effects, which can only work in slowness. We are shown stupefying, huge space craft that hover like disembodied mountains in thin air, and are offered the weirdness of the witches of Macbeth by mysterious women sealed from the world behind veils. Most importantly, we are shown the vast emptiness of the planet with the sand-like “spice” that is necessary to travel across the intra-galactic empire that lords over all humanity. Here on this planet we meet the harshness of a desert people and find in them the mysticism that is born from emptiness, reflecting with precision the birthing of Islam. Here in the vastness and emptiness and space, we find the drone of the cicadas and the awe of creation; here in trackless sameness we find the endless summer of youth played out against eternity.
But all so emotionally cold. Dune reflects well the nature of God (Allah) most favored by Muslims: Pure Will. God has willed all creation into existence, and it is to this will that we must submit. To let just one step fall out of line is a violation of eternal law, a losing fight of puny humans against the great Almighty who lords over infinity with inscrutable ease. Nature, God’s reflection, is no more forgiving, for to get lost in the desert – to go off the beaten trail – means certain death. This is the mood of Dune.
Just the week before seeing “Dune,” I read an unlikely page turner, a biographical anthology entitled Caryll Houselander, Essential Writings, by Wendy Wright. Born in England 1901, Houselander fashioned her eccentric Catholic Christianity through the two world wars. She was eccentric not because she challenged the faith, but because she grasped her faith’s essence in ways impossible for most others. She had no room for superficial piety or homely sentimentality, but instead went straight to the heart of the Christian definition of God: Love. Not the love of a boy and his dog, although that is no tiny thing, but rather the love that we so often hear about but cannot grasp because of the very heavy stick of divine punishment that lies besides it. Would any of us, for instance, send an errant child to eternal torture? If not, what could possibly be the nature of this love that supposedly defines this god?
This Houselander answers, not so much in the logic of her writings, but in the mood they convey. An artist and woodcarver by trade, she had learned to carve out the essential feeling in words as well as wood. Through her, the chorus of the cicadas brings not only eternal mystery, but a closeness, an intimacy with both God and his creation.
Since she plays no music, nor has any special effects to show, I must try to convey the crystalline sense of God’s love (through Christ) the she gives us with her words in the limited format of this essay:
“All our life is only a journey, a series of attachments and detachments. I keep thinking of W.B. Yeasts’ perfect lines, ‘Our souls are love and a continual farewell.’/ What is said of the material journey is also applicable to the journey of the spirit.”
“But it was not with our suffering that Christ fell in love; it was with us. He identified himself with our suffering because he identified himself with us, and he came not only to lead his own historical life on earth, but to live the life of every man who would receive him into his soul, and to be the way back to joy for every individual. He took our humanity in order to give us his, and since guilty man must… ‘make’ his soul through expiation, through personal atonement, Christ chose to atone for mankind as each man must do for himself: through suffering…”
“Christ did not become man, only to lead his short life on earth…, but to live each of our lives. He did not choose his Passion, only to suffer it in his own human nature…, but in order to suffer it in the suffering of each one of his members, through all ages, until the end of time.”
“He took our humanity, just as it is, with all its wretchedness and ugliness, and gave it back to us just as his humanity is, transfigured by the beauty of his living, filled full of his joy. He came back from the long journey through death, to give us his Risen life to be our life, so that no matter what suffering we meet, we can meet it with the whole power of the love that has overcome the world.”
I do not know if the quotes above are enough to give the reader the sense of divine love that the biographer has conveyed through Houselander’s words, but I can say that in reading the book, I was as physically affected as I had been with the buzzing of the cicadas or the panorama of endless dunes spread out before me. What love she has seen! It is not the dripping sentimentality with which we are so familiar, but the selfless, more perfect form of love that parents have for their children. Here we are led to understand that the stick of eternal damnation is what God wants least for us. Rather, we are as lost in this (material) world as the drug addict is lost in his addiction, and can only come back to a healthy balance through our own will, a will that is fortified for the task once the path back has been freely chosen. As with the recovering addict, we must choose the path ourselves, but once done are encouraged and helped in our effort the whole way with the achingly perfect love of God the Savior.
So both Will and Love overwhelm, as they must to be understood, for each is necessary for the emergence of our hidden greatness. Neither can be understood in logic alone, as any honest theologian must attest. And while faith needs no proof, the crucial sense of the divine – of what has existed in all humanity for all time – depends on mood. The great sculptures and artists and musicians of the European Renaissance(s) were filled with this saving light - and so, too, are some artists today, even in Hollywood, and even in 20th century Britain.
Mood, though - however true it feels - is often not Truth, as anyone filled with vengeance or hatred will show us. God could be a brutal dictator without Love, and an ineffective eunuch without Will. Only the merger of these moods will show us the way. Combined, they are Nature and Humanity spread out across the universe, the drone of the cicadas and the sacrifice of Christ which together make the “spice” that leads us through and past the stars. They are within us, waiting to be experienced through the right movie, the right sound or picture, the right words, and a will open to loving grace. For those with cash, the experience is worth the price of admission. For those without, the price has already been paid.
In the lazy country summers of my youth, mid-to-late season was often visited by choruses of cicadas. By then, we were browned by the sun and foot-hardened by weeks without shoes and felt, without actively thinking about it, at one with nature. That feeling was echoed and solidified by the cicadas, whose day-long love songs penetrated far deeper than the hot sun, warming something inside that I could not then understand, but craved. I finally came to grasp the meaning of the mood when the “Acid Rock” era erupted in the mid-1960’s, especially through the epic “Sgt. Pepper’s” album put out by the Beatles. The album was spacey enough, but it was a small song by George Harrison that really did it, through the use of the sitar. There I found the magic of the cicadas, and there came to know what it meant: Nirvana, Godhead. The drone of the instrument excited the same feeling as the hum of the cicadas, which both brought about the deep sense of a united eternity.
It’s not easy to maintain a mood such as this, but I was struck with two artistic works these last two weeks that were able to do just that. One was the new Dune movie, whose advertisements promised us would not be the flop that earlier attempts at capturing the ethos of the Dune sci-fi series had been. They were right, although, just as with the hum of cicadas or the drone of the sitar (or bag pipes), the movie might not be for everyone. As with the cicadas, some might be annoyed at the slow (monotonous) progress made by the movie, which is to be understood. But not me.
The mood. It comes out in the background music, yes, but also in the majesty of the special effects, which can only work in slowness. We are shown stupefying, huge space craft that hover like disembodied mountains in thin air, and are offered the weirdness of the witches of Macbeth by mysterious women sealed from the world behind veils. Most importantly, we are shown the vast emptiness of the planet with the sand-like “spice” that is necessary to travel across the intra-galactic empire that lords over all humanity. Here on this planet we meet the harshness of a desert people and find in them the mysticism that is born from emptiness, reflecting with precision the birthing of Islam. Here in the vastness and emptiness and space, we find the drone of the cicadas and the awe of creation; here in trackless sameness we find the endless summer of youth played out against eternity.
But all so emotionally cold. Dune reflects well the nature of God (Allah) most favored by Muslims: Pure Will. God has willed all creation into existence, and it is to this will that we must submit. To let just one step fall out of line is a violation of eternal law, a losing fight of puny humans against the great Almighty who lords over infinity with inscrutable ease. Nature, God’s reflection, is no more forgiving, for to get lost in the desert – to go off the beaten trail – means certain death. This is the mood of Dune.
Just the week before seeing “Dune,” I read an unlikely page turner, a biographical anthology entitled Caryll Houselander, Essential Writings, by Wendy Wright. Born in England 1901, Houselander fashioned her eccentric Catholic Christianity through the two world wars. She was eccentric not because she challenged the faith, but because she grasped her faith’s essence in ways impossible for most others. She had no room for superficial piety or homely sentimentality, but instead went straight to the heart of the Christian definition of God: Love. Not the love of a boy and his dog, although that is no tiny thing, but rather the love that we so often hear about but cannot grasp because of the very heavy stick of divine punishment that lies besides it. Would any of us, for instance, send an errant child to eternal torture? If not, what could possibly be the nature of this love that supposedly defines this god?
This Houselander answers, not so much in the logic of her writings, but in the mood they convey. An artist and woodcarver by trade, she had learned to carve out the essential feeling in words as well as wood. Through her, the chorus of the cicadas brings not only eternal mystery, but a closeness, an intimacy with both God and his creation.
Since she plays no music, nor has any special effects to show, I must try to convey the crystalline sense of God’s love (through Christ) the she gives us with her words in the limited format of this essay:
“All our life is only a journey, a series of attachments and detachments. I keep thinking of W.B. Yeasts’ perfect lines, ‘Our souls are love and a continual farewell.’/ What is said of the material journey is also applicable to the journey of the spirit.”
“But it was not with our suffering that Christ fell in love; it was with us. He identified himself with our suffering because he identified himself with us, and he came not only to lead his own historical life on earth, but to live the life of every man who would receive him into his soul, and to be the way back to joy for every individual. He took our humanity in order to give us his, and since guilty man must… ‘make’ his soul through expiation, through personal atonement, Christ chose to atone for mankind as each man must do for himself: through suffering…”
“Christ did not become man, only to lead his short life on earth…, but to live each of our lives. He did not choose his Passion, only to suffer it in his own human nature…, but in order to suffer it in the suffering of each one of his members, through all ages, until the end of time.”
“He took our humanity, just as it is, with all its wretchedness and ugliness, and gave it back to us just as his humanity is, transfigured by the beauty of his living, filled full of his joy. He came back from the long journey through death, to give us his Risen life to be our life, so that no matter what suffering we meet, we can meet it with the whole power of the love that has overcome the world.”
I do not know if the quotes above are enough to give the reader the sense of divine love that the biographer has conveyed through Houselander’s words, but I can say that in reading the book, I was as physically affected as I had been with the buzzing of the cicadas or the panorama of endless dunes spread out before me. What love she has seen! It is not the dripping sentimentality with which we are so familiar, but the selfless, more perfect form of love that parents have for their children. Here we are led to understand that the stick of eternal damnation is what God wants least for us. Rather, we are as lost in this (material) world as the drug addict is lost in his addiction, and can only come back to a healthy balance through our own will, a will that is fortified for the task once the path back has been freely chosen. As with the recovering addict, we must choose the path ourselves, but once done are encouraged and helped in our effort the whole way with the achingly perfect love of God the Savior.
So both Will and Love overwhelm, as they must to be understood, for each is necessary for the emergence of our hidden greatness. Neither can be understood in logic alone, as any honest theologian must attest. And while faith needs no proof, the crucial sense of the divine – of what has existed in all humanity for all time – depends on mood. The great sculptures and artists and musicians of the European Renaissance(s) were filled with this saving light - and so, too, are some artists today, even in Hollywood, and even in 20th century Britain.
Mood, though - however true it feels - is often not Truth, as anyone filled with vengeance or hatred will show us. God could be a brutal dictator without Love, and an ineffective eunuch without Will. Only the merger of these moods will show us the way. Combined, they are Nature and Humanity spread out across the universe, the drone of the cicadas and the sacrifice of Christ which together make the “spice” that leads us through and past the stars. They are within us, waiting to be experienced through the right movie, the right sound or picture, the right words, and a will open to loving grace. For those with cash, the experience is worth the price of admission. For those without, the price has already been paid.
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