The Accursed Defiler of this Land

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens

Maybe all of this is too abstract, too remote from my own experience.

Jesus says, "Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me" (Mark 9:37).

I satisfied that requirement, right? I've received seven such children into the world. But how do I react when my 4 year old knocks over the whole bowl of eggs I let him whisk? When they don't do their chores completely or competently? When they misbehave in public? What is happening in my heart at that point? It's hard to describe exactly, but it isn't good. And in the collapsed morality of the Gospel, in which thinking something is tantamount to doing it, in which looking lustfully is tantamount to adultery, in which anger is tantamount to murder, how am I not a habitual murderer?

How am I not the "accursed defiler of this land"?

In the collapsed moral universe of the Gospel (as well as that of Oedipus the King), saints and heroes identify themselves as defilers. In this universe, we find that even language collapses in on itself as "the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you" (Matthew 5:2). This does not mean, as some have concluded, that we don't say anything, that we retreat into a chastened quietism, that we don't show up at the various rallies, protests, vigils, etc. But the mystic and artist shows up to these things with characteristically empty hands due to his experience of collapse. There is no "other."

There is only a trinitarian civilization of something. Love, death, sin, what?

Mystic theologians have always affirmed the crucial nature of this work. Maybe we got into it because it was fun or ecstatic or whatever. But allowing oneself to become sin in this way and be nailed to the cross, we help bring redemption in a way that more polemical or political means cannot.

Again, this is because the devil "seeth every high thing," except that which goes on in this dark night of collapse.