New Pathways

The following is an email sent from Joe to Will and Art on 31 March 2016.

Will: Though I always knew it would be true, I must say I'm relieved you don't see my loss of Catholicism as creating a chasm too wide for us to bridge. I know what you mean by not having a reference point that would help you understand my situation, and me yours. It bothers me, but that's one of the reasons why I want to keep talking with you and Art. I'm trying to be methodical and accurate in my description of this "loss of faith"—even that phrase isn't right. Your description of Sartre likely approximates the truth. And you're right, it isn't a mystical atheism. Nothing in Greene gets at this—trust me, I checked. Negation is the right method here: I know what the loss of faith is not. And it is decidedly not John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. There's no embrace for which I yearn.

I've changed so significantly in the past two years—in many more ways than one—I feel a strong urge, as a necessity, to go "home," to square one, to where I started before everything changed. Your friendship and mentorship has meant more to me than you can know, and in many ways is my mental home. You gave me many of the terms by which I think and write. 

It's funny, because you did teach me to think, and because you provided me with certain habits of mind that burned new pathways in my neural framework—that got me through college, that got me the job I have, that got me into grad schools—I must infer and really do feel that my thinking about God was influenced by you, as well as my thinking about the very atheism that has taken the place of my former belief. Your mentorship laid the foundation for a lot that goes on in my mental world—the stuff you surely would have intended, and the stuff you maybe wouldn't have, or at least the stuff that might have given you pause. Anyway, I'm excited and anxious to see you soon.

Art: I'd have no problem posting these wherever, and certainly have no problem with anyone in the group reading them. I'm honored (and a little surprised!) that you'd like to keep reading, and that you think others would as well.

I've been trying to write about this for the past two years.The big shift in me, the loss of faith, happened or at least was catalyzed when I went to India two years ago. A lot happened there, both on the streets of New Delhi and in the desert mountains of Leh, a city in the Himalayas, and I've been trying to capture it. The sights and sounds and smells of India are inextricably bound up with the contours of my own spiritual story. But I've never trusted anything I've put on paper about it. Now, for some reason, I feel like I can finally write about India and everything that happened after. I'm hoping our emails can provide some of the foundation for that. And, along the way, I'm hoping you and Will can read what I write and respond. 

À la recherche du temps perdu

The following is an email sent from Joe to Will and Art on 30 March 2016.

Marcel Proust

It's funny you bring up the Myers Briggs, Will. After having accepted my designation as an INFJ for years, I began to realize just recently how significantly I have changed in the past twenty-four months. It's mostly because of my job: I've been required by social and professional and even intellectual necessity to cultivate savoir faire and sociability—to do my job even remotely well, I've had to run with traditionalist conservatives and social conservatives and libertarians and tenderhearted center-leftists and democratic socialists and gender-and-race theorists, as well as hipsters and vegans and young Republicans and every other variety of millennial. I've come not just to like this sort of living, but to derive all my energy from it. So, I decided to take the test a few days ago to see what I've become. Verdict: very pronounced E, pretty pronounced N, only 6% preference for F, and a meager 1% preference for J.

That's a roundabout way of getting at my interest in politics, Will. Not accounting for the interest I developed in political philosophy as an undergraduate, nor for the attraction to political and cultural criticism that I've developed only in the last two to three years, the root of my urge toward the political life is an acquired preoccupation with politics in the Thucydidean sense: not the politics of casting ballots necessarily, but rather the activity of discoursing and debating with other people on every social level—in small communities of thinkers, throughout a university, and in the wide world.

At the same time, I must acknowledge that partisan politics became interesting to me right around the time when I lost my faith, which was about two years ago. There's much to be said about that topic—and frankly, if it does not prove too often to be a non-sequitur in our conversations, I'd like to haggle over and piece through it a bit with you both. I want that mostly because you both knew me when I was at my most, shall we say, faithful: my most Catholic in the spiritual and social senses. You knew me when I felt certain that I would live a devoutly Catholic life, when my main preoccupation was how truly to be Catholic in a secular world. And now you are among the only people in my life who can critique me, who can remind me of faith in ways others just can't (not to re-convert me—I am not asking for that, have no real interest in it—but to remind me). This is admittedly selfish. I hope in return that my agnosticism might be of some use to you and the project. If it's not, I'll stay out of it. But I do remember that my character is an angry, disaffected agnostic. Now that's a character I can play.

Presently, there's something about my agnosticism (let's be honest: functional atheism) that troubles me. Because my agnosticism is so easily incorporated into secular life, especially among academics and the sets toward which I most naturally gravitate, I am not required to contend with the claims and virtues of my old Catholicism. In other words, it would be very easy for me to ditch the former Joe—the one who was devout, the one whose mental horizon was populated with Christ and the Church and Aquinas and Dorothy Day—for the new Joe—the one with new political interests, new moral sensibilities, who can run head-first into the sort of life offered by the 21st century educated cosmopolitan milieu that runs The New York Times, most universities, and with whom I generally feel at home.

Put otherwise, I see something wrong or unwise in the prospect of sliding unthinkingly and comfortably into postmodern secularism and en vogue secular cosmopolitanism. Granted, I already sort of fit into these categories.  There is just something fundamentally unsatisfying about what would be most comfortable: a quick change of worldviews from Catholicism to 21st century secularism, the stripping off of my Catholic clothes and putting on of the ready-to-hand jumpsuit of the liberal secularist, the NPR-listening educated Democrat, the good citizen.

Because I have this ill-defined fear, I head to mass once in a while, usually at a church where I'm anonymous, to try to re-enter the mental space of my old Catholicism—to smell the incense, hear the organ and, à la recherche du temps perdu, be brought vividly back to my old mind and soul. But occasionally these attempts at anonymity fail, and I run into someone I know. Many such people are aware I don't go to church anymore; many also heard rumors about me, circulated among Grand Rapids Catholics a couple years ago and that seem never to go away, which insist that I'm some kind of rank hedonist, or Hitchensian anti-theist, or sexual adventurer. So I'm often looked at with a mixture of hesitance and curiosity and mild, pious concern. Indeed, this very sort of thing happened on Good Friday, when I went to Tenebrae at the Cathedral of St Andrew. The questioner, a Catholic Central grad, asked what brought me to church? I told her it was the aesthetics.

I said that because I think Joyce once said it, and anyway it's true: the aesthetics, the beautiful physicality of the icons and deep sorrow of the chants, stir into life certain old feelings and associations. But their function is nostalgic, and I'm becoming less interested in nostalgia. So why do I still go to church every now and then?Well, that's a question I want to answer. I think talking with the group, being part of this project in some manner, might help me continue to ask the question.

It's funny, it's only been two years since I stopped believing in God—or rather, it's been two years since the moment I noticed that the belief in God had exited me. That's not a long time. But the exit was so dramatic, so complete, that all I felt in its wake was a spiritual vacancy that, after a short while, I regarded with only mild interest and numb concern. That vacancy has filled, in some manner, with other things. I don't sense it anymore, and because I don't sense it, I find it hard to remember what my belief even felt like. Is that because I never believed? Or because I have a short memory? Or because the postmodern malaise is so hegemonic that it not only invades you but blinds you to the possibilities and promises of faith?

Anyway, this project might helping me remember. To what end, who knows? But I prefer the struggle of memory to the blissful ignorance of dementia.

My Formula for Human Greatness

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 27 February 2016.

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Leonello Spada

Something has been consolidating or coalescing in my brain recently that I wanted to throw out there for your consideration. Today's reading about the prodigal son helped me put several things into partial perspective.

It hit me with this passage where the prodigal son returns:

…his father ordered his servants,
‘Quickly, bring the finest robe and put it on him;
put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
Take the fattened calf and slaughter it.
Then let us celebrate with a feast,
because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again;
he was lost, and has been found.’
Then the celebration began.
Now the older son had been out in the field
and, on his way back, as he neared the house,
he heard the sound of music and dancing.

I'm putting this all together with several different things, some of which we've discussed before. I'm just going to list them off here:

1. Nietzsche's amor fati/eternal recurrence/lake that dammed itself up
2. Camus's Sisyphus
3. Hamlet's inaction
4. The wisdom of Silenus
5. Arthur White's motif of long delays and our distrust of the Benefactor

And if you can believe it, I'm formulating a Christian version of all these things, one that finds a formula for human greatness and heroism.

What the prodigal son did in this reading is ask for his inheritance early. What he really asked for was a horizon beyond his father's house, beyond his life—a kind of Camusian suicide. Upon receiving his inheritance ahead of time, he “collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.” Like Nietzsche's lake, he flows off to a distant horizon and, in so doing, drains and dissipates himself.

This is no formula for human greatness, no matter how resplendent the horizon, no matter how grand the enterprise. As Horatio puts it, we follow ghosts “to the dreadful summit of the cliff.” Similarly, what Christ is saying in this reading is that the horizon of action, of accomplishment, of ambition is the primary occasion for our perdition. It is how we become next to nothing, so that all that is left is to hire ourselves out to tend swine.

Chances are, we've already done this countless times in life. But we can always dam ourselves up and become a healthy sized lake, whatever altitude we're at. Smaller streams draining off to this or that enterprise seem to be an appropriate part of a lake's ongoing health, but not the eager gushing of our whole selves off to some counterfeit consummation. Herein lies the difference between “dying to self” and Camusian suicide. The former not the latter is the “consummation devoutly to be wished,” as Hamlet only later realizes. When the prodigal son returns to the father's house, he again experiences its riches—the finest robe, the ring on his finger, the sandals on his feet, the sound of music and dancing, etc. But he has died to the idea of a horizon. Which is scary because most of our lives are hell bent on the horizon.

I can't help but read Camus atheistic text from this Christian perspective:

Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory.

It is in the father's house that the present moment subsists. Only in choosing to live in the father's house can we hear “the myriad wondering little voices.” In my case, those “wondering little voices” are often actual children. When the roaring torrent of my own ambition isn't deafening me, I can hear those little voices, smell their hair—in short, exist. But that is only after the idols have been silenced.

And this isn't a prosperity gospel I'm talking about, but in the father's house, we are rich. At the same time—like Hamlet, like the prodigal son, like Camus's Sisyphus, like Nietzsche's lake—the hero of the story strains against and even overleaps its bounds, usually to his own detriment. Thus Jacob wrestles with God. Thus Jesus says of the skeptical Nathaniel, “Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him.” Thus, the older son is not the hero of the story.

But outside the father's house—traveling off toward some horizon, following those ghosts—we don't own anything, and we end up slaves or at the bottom of some cliff. When Hamlet returns from his voyage out over the waters, the ghost is gone. Only then does the story tilt quickly to its denouement. I have a feeling a similar criterion has emerged in The Return of Arthur White.

So with some edits, I agree with Nietzsche that “this is my formula for human greatness.” Not love of fate or fortune, but of God's will, “which shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will.” Not saying our project will ever partake of that greatness, but I want to set that up as its criterion.

My Horn is Exalted

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 22 December 2015.



I'm picking up an old thread regarding achieving success and fame in the context of Christianity. Eschewing any false "prosperity gospel" perspectives, it seems that the Christian is exalted only IN GOD.

I'm looking at today's psalm:

My heart exalts in the LORD,
my horn is exalted in my God.
I have swallowed up my enemies.
I rejoice in my victory.

Only after one has been swallowed up IN GOD—or more precisely, had one's "horn" swallowed up IN GOD—is it exalted. I'm sorry, I've always thought "my horn is exalted" is pretty funny.

And maybe this is too sexual a way of looking at it, but is God the only environment in which we swell, become erect and strong and capable of projecting forth that fructifying seed? Only IN GOD can this life be nourished and flourish into its fullness. Paradoxically, is the point at which we, in turn, are able to swallow up the horns of our enemies? And I don't think this can be thought of a pre-Christian vanquishing of enemies, which would necessitate some malevolent mechanism, an abysmal or toxic womb, vagina dentata, etc. In other words, something antithetical and incoherent with the beneficence that has benefited us.

Yes, bows are broken and the tottering gird on strength, but neither of these mess up the phallic/yonic imagery. The arrows of our enemies remain unbroken and, well, the word gird.

So, we swallow up our enemies in some similarly benevolent sense, nourishing and nurturing them as it were. The victory consists in their enmity being dispersed, defused...made diffuse but allowed to flourish in its inner essence. In the Christian vision, wouldn't those horns also be exalted? Bows broken, but horns exalted. We swallow them up; they gird on strength.

So back to the axiom: my horn is exalted in my God. And this means only in God. This means total self-giving, no guardedness, no prophylactic constraint, no holding anything back. Thus, the watchwords for the Christian artist (or, more precisely, the artist) are prodigality, proliferation, profusion. We pour out the whole alabaster bottle of perfume, keeping none for ourselves, nor even for any charitable purposes (Matt 26:7).

In this environment, the desire for money and fame aren't destroyed, they are just increasingly diffuse, negligible. The desire for money and fame can only solidify in a falsely exalted, frozen state. True exaltation occurs only in an environment of ecstatic love, wherein all falseness melts.

On a somewhat related note, enjoy Klaus Nomi's performance of the aria from Purcell's King Arthur, "What Power Art Thou," in which the Cold Genius is awoken by Cupid and later is forced to acknowledge his power. Incidentally, this was Nomi's last performance before succumbing to AIDS.

What power art thou
Who from below
Hast made me rise
Unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow

See'st thou not how stiff
And wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold

I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath
I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath

Let me, let me,
Let me freeze again
Let me, let me
Freeze again to death
Let me, let me, let me
Freeze again to death...

Cartography of the Mind (Part 9 of 17)

The following are excerpts of an illuminated book sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

addressing darkness & light through inquiry & reflection

I felt that
I had
stepped
through a
door that had
been usu-
ally left open
to discover trem
endous treasures
there these
treasures terrified
me I told myself
that I could turn aro
und and go. And then I
walked on.

I am wondering...

1. Have the Benefactor and Leif Erikson's Sister become one character?
2. If not, what is their relationship to one another? To the Savage Sisters or Shakespeare (= the Icelandic Wyrd Sisters?)? To Victoria Woolf?
3. Are each of the above ultimately a different name for the same thing?
4. If so, is that thing Paganism (aka Christianity's sister religion)?
5. What is the overarching role of (myth+) paganism's resurgence within the context of this project?* (My deductions on #5 to follow my questioning...)

6. I'm a bit confused about the Benefactor's intentions...Is the Benefactor a Redeemer, a Destroyer, or both? Initially, I thought the horror raps had been written to illuminate the world's darkness, so to speak as though by carving the hallowed history into Detroit's original and unchanging rock, (s)he was ultimately giving a voice to the oppression and corruption that plagued the Benefactor's remembered world since conception. So, in the context of the story, I categorized the Benefactor as the Storyteller: (S)he's survived through many lifetimes. Outlasted history and embraced as an ageless androgynous (turn page) elder who's etched our story out into the stone for us, perhaps as a warning. In a sense, I viewed the cave as the axis mundi; as people's tunnel to Christ by way of Pagan myth. Of course a story demands an audience, but it was my assumption that despite the Benefactor's use of the Lodestone to lure people to the underworld to hear of the redemptive horrors, we were complacent in our world; we had no desire to be stirred out of this complacency, no desire to confront harsh truths, no yearning to grow deep like roots. In yet another sense, I viewed the Benefactor as Will views the French: as a protector of America's pieces we'd rather dispose of until the moment we're finally ready to grasp their value. From my current understanding, however, the Benefactor is, in fact, "nefarious"; (s)he is destroying our history through total inaccessibility to it. To revisit Will's message on storytelling, the Benefactor is ultimately rendering his/her survival meaningless—and in turn ours—by forgoing creation a total destructive collapse of all history. Though allowing us access into the cave would "make us what we are," his/her selfish isolation makes us what we were never intended to be: greedy, gluttonous, selfish, alienated, miserable, the most dangerous city in America for the third year in a row, and ultimately doomed. Am I getting warm? If the Benefactor is "nefarious," it would seem that my interpretation of paganism's role in this project is incorrect, or partially at least. My most recent deductions, from piecing together bits and pieces from past e-mails and blog posts are that this project both embraces paganism as a bridge to the "myth become fact" aka Christianity and discredits paganism for leading us to Christianity through a vehicle other than Christ. In the context of the e-mails, the Benefactor = Graham Greene's lieutenant, in that any potential triumphs will be empty failures; any truth the Benefactor arrives at without Christ is not truth at all, but mere shadows of shadows of shadows. Further, the Benefactor is not evangelizing. While (s)he may know better than anyone the limits of our physical world ("The Most Authentic Critiquers"), (s)he does not draw others toward the beauty of God. Instead (s)he, quite literally, repels people from it. AM I GETTING WARMER?

A Growing Gratitude for Crosses

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 26 November 2015.

The Crucifixion by Andrea Mategna

Some thoughts on Thanksgiving, also having finished transcribing Liza's What the Lord Hath Made Crooked letters:

I could enumerate so many blessings—worldly things—I've received in this life. That said, the most transformative perspective or schema I've experienced has been a growing gratitude for crosses:

for crookedness and constraints
for suffering and setback
for perplexity, sickness, and sorrow
for being passed over for honors,
for not even being in the running
for being hindered, hobbled, and hampered in the pursuit of accolades, ambitions, and accomplishments

Why is any of this a blessing? As the prayer goes,

Pray for us Mary, mother of sorrows, that we will crucify our pride with Christ on the Cross.

For me, the biggest shift has been having children. I started to realize that these sweet messengers of God's love were simultaneously scourges and sources of setback and suffering. But without scourging, I disappear into myself. Without the way of the cross, I don't look outward from an inner sense of my own importance.

Camus's Sisyphus doesn't attain consciousness until he embraces the full weight of his fate, absurd though it may seem. And yet, my fate is even more embraceable because it is eminently lovable. Marriage, too, that most ecstatic of human unions, has hidden within it a cross. Christ imbues all his sacraments and life generally with his paschal powers. But most especially suffering. Even all our joys and accomplishments have a cross hidden within them.

These moments and opportunities and honors and laurels that pass me by—usually because I am paralytic or pariah—these are blessings too. Because as Christians, we are all waiting on Christ, keeping our wicks trimmed through suffering.

The striving and struggle, when Christ crests the hilltop of Golgotha, when he stretches out his arms to the universe he created. In that strangest of all moments in our strange, singular religion we discover the unsearchable greatness of God

his terrible deeds
his glorious majesty
his wondrous works
his abundant goodness
his great kindness

It is at this moment when Christ himself, according to G.K. Chesterton, "seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Pray for us sinners, for a grace that overflows the cup of suffering.

De Profundis

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 October 2015.

Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré

More on the saline abortion avenger.

The two best stories in the world, Exodus and the Gospel, begin with a massacre of babies.

Evil is characterized most by its banality, which means it sets itself up against creativity, procreativity, prolificity, etc. Inarticulate babies sum up that impulse perfectly; that's why Satan has always laid siege to that stronghold.

I'm not sure where our story is heading, but I think it makes sense that this would be a starting point of sorts, albeit of a later episode.

Is the fact that it's twins the reason why Farthington seeks an abortion? Or was that his idea all along? In other words, all of his followers need to be emptied; some of the stronger ones need to be broken. It's clear that Farthington is pissed and that something didn't go as planned, either with Will, Arthur, or Steffi, or any combination of these three. Steffi almost certainly would have needed to be drugged at this point; Farthington doesn't have that kind of control over her. Will may have been on his way down to save her.

The fact that some horror occurred down in the tunnels is probably enough. That's the nature of the dark substratum: irrational, inarticulate, incoherent, unfathomable, yawning, awesome. But that something is born, unleashed upon the world is also important. God knows all about Leviathan: no dual Universe. He chose to use the primeval chaos as the sign of his first sacrament, for Moses, for Jesus, and for us.

So mind blowing and beautiful this strange faith of ours!

Part of what I want to do in creative pursuits is to "reconstitute" (wrong word) chaos. Then let God do what he's always done: bring order out of it. But I can't play the role of junior god; I can only describe the abyss:

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine!

The Saline Avenger (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 September 2015.

Jason Voorhees drowns in Crystal Lake

I'm taking notes and then writing when I have a spare moment. This is unrelated to Liza's newest batch of illuminated texts (thanks for keeping the lights on Liza!).

I wanted to take up Will's thread of morality plays.

In particular, I wanted to spend a little time within the American tradition, which is alive and well. In recent years, this tradition has largely taken the form of horror movies.

Unlike Japanese horror, which just involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time, American horror has to do with strict Puritan notions sin and punishment.

Perhaps the best emblem of this tradition is that of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise. Jason, a mentally disabled, deformed child, drowns when two camp counselors go off to have sex. In Friday the 13th, it's Jason's mom who does the killing, but the stage is set for the archetypal vengeful angel who—in his unassailable innocence—returns to punish these transgressions. It's telling that Alice, who fends off the sexual advances of a male camp counselor earlier in the film, is the heroine and only survivor of the first movie (she is summarily dispatched by Jason himself at the beginning of the second).

I don't have the Jung that I've been reading with me, but I love how he issues this total smack down of the Enlightenment and its supposed exorcism of spiritual realities. Modern man is sorely mistaken when he thinks he has exchanged centuries of darkness for the bright light of positivistic, optimistic, empirical thought. All he has done is suppressed the underlying realities, which means they inevitably return, only this time in neurotic or psychotic forms.

I love that Jung explains that the only therapy required for Catholics suffering from modern malaise is to get them connected back up with the Church. The path is much more difficult for Protestants, who initiated the whole de-mystification project culminating in the Enlightenment. Of course, Nietzsche and Wagner and Jung and others had plenty to say in opposition to this wholesale sellout to rationalistic, Apollonian, Alexandrian, Socratic thought, but the celebration has mostly continued unabated down to the present day.

The total banishment of religion from the public square is just one symptom of the larger problem. Again, the Jungian axiom: anything banished returns, only this time in neurotic or psychotic form. What returns feels no guilt. What returns is unabashed, undaunted, intractable, incorrigible. What returns cannot be reasoned with. In the best horror movies, what returns doesn't speak: Jason, Michael Myers, all the various entities in It Follows.

The premise of It Follows is particularly interesting. By having sex with someone you take on the curse: an entity will pursue you at a walking pace until it catches up and brutally mutilates you. This entity is inexorable in its pursuit and invisible to everyone else. Guilt and punishment cannot be mitigated by reference to the consensus loose morality of our times, staying within the brightly lit public square so to speak. Inevitably, you are flushed from your rationalistic hiding place into the dark, inarticulate, isolating, intimate, collapsed world of your guilt.

Long story short, I've been thinking along these lines with regard to the End of Arthur White. If this is a morality tale—and an American morality tale at that—by what instrument, by what mechanism is the justice administered? In Dante, the sin is inextricably bound up in the punishment; there is no separation between the two. This is probably the more accurate, more mature view. But inside the puerile Puritan tradition that is our heritage, we've needed to embody the punishment as something outside ourselves.

I'm thinking of a resolution akin to the one that occurs in Geek Love, where the telekinetic Chick destroys the entire Fabulon camp in a firestorm.

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 5 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

16. We liberate these demons through prayer. Andre (and Hasidism) knows whaddup. Prayer can rightfully mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people, of course, but to me prayer is a way of decisive living punctuated by constant inquiry. Am I acting lovingly and gratefully to everything I encounter today? Am I accepting, supportive, and patient in all of my interactions? Am I listening to all that's being communicated with me? Am I trying my best? Am I nurturing the uprooted and nourishing the firmly planted? Am I living the truth? In asking ourselves these questions and, ultimately, in being on the side of light and life, we are actively fighting our demons and offering a hand to our brothers and sisters in fighting their own. For what these demons desire and require from us in order to thrive is first and foremost oblivion. In resisting detection, it's unlikely to be challenged. If detected, the demon's aim is to lure us into a spiritual state so despondent that we stop seeing ourselves as the mystical body of Christ and instead see ourselves as in the image and likeness of the devil.

20. (Excuse my wonky numbering) However! to look upon this horror and utilize our repulsion to propel us closer to God is the most brutal form of attack against this demonic presence. And because I can't possibly stress it enough, the way in which we utilize this repulsion is through daily positive intent, humility, determination, patience, love, and personified prayer. Each failure to extend these virtues into our daily interactions is, of course, a victory for the devil, but each of these victories is squandered when reconfigured as a breadcrumb like blessing that guides us back to our path. I say (wrote) "All our lives it will be like this" because there is no earthly end; in place of an ending there are only endless opportunities for new beginnings. Cast off your disdain and you'll see that it's not the end, but only a disguise for a welcoming celebration (Rumi). We must, again, remember that life is a procession, that "to be" is "to grow," and the only way to grow (toward heaven) is to remain on our path or be in the process of making it back to the path. We are of one phase and of all phases. Evil propels us and reform of evil desire propels us.
21. God does not expect, nor does He desire, for us to come to Him with the answers. He merely asks for us to make ourselves worthy of receiving them someday by living our lives as learners, not as knowers. It's here that we again get a glimpse into the understanding that every struggle and failure is indeed a blessing. Our weaknesses, our sufferings, our impatience, our wandering—these are each, in their own little ways, our teachers, our guides from beyond. It's my belief that we make ourselves worthy not in a solemn and steady procession toward death, but rather in a joyful and hopeful procession through death. It's only in dying in this life that we can ever hope to find eternal life in the next one.
22. I've a letter's length to expound on "bringing religion to schools."

That, and more, up next! Liza

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon." - Mizuta Masahide

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 4 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

14. Onward to my next miscommunication. I did NOT in fact interpret "devil" to mean "enemy." Not by any means. I understand the demons of which you speak. I was merely trying to outline the preliminary steps in combating them: recognizability of their pervasiveness, perspective, patience, and love. Step 1, as I mentioned, is to recognize them in others. In recognizing them, my suggestion was to love these people nonetheless. The implication in my last letter was not that our enemies are the demons; I rather meant to imply the fluidity spectrum of ethical existence, as well as to bring light to the inherent connection weaving its way beneath us, above us, and through us on a constant loop. It's through this understanding that I AM HE AS YOU ARE HE AS YOU ARE ME AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER that we're able to humanize and love even the most corrupt and brutally inhumane. It's through this understanding that we take collective responsibility over our actions and our brothers'/sisters' actions with equal investment. Whether young or old, moral or immoral, beautiful or ugly, kind or cruel, intelligent or vapid, we must not only recognize the divine in our earthy brothers and sisters, but it's paramount that our simultaneous gaze is on the demonic and mortal within them, as well. This, of course, extends to ourselves, too. (Note: back to Ubuntuism). EVERY ATOM BELONGING TO OURSELVES AS GOOD, AS BAD BELONGS TO ALL OF US. THE HAND OF GOD IS THE PROMISE OF OUR OWN. THE SPIRIT OF GOD IS THE SPIRIT OF OUR OWN. ALL THE MEN EVER BORN ARE ALSO MY BROTHERS, AND THE WOMEN MY SISTERS AND LOVERS. AND THAT IS KELSON OF CREATION IS LOVE.
15. It's through Whitman's lens that our eyes may reveal to our hearts the understanding not only to guide us back toward our path but to become agents of guidance ourselves for the least of our brothers and sisters who mistook the earthly path we've paved ourselves with gold for the heavenly path that's been paved through the dirt for us from above.
16. Art, you mentioned in your last e-mail that the souls of Trump and Gilber are still in play, though you were referencing actual demons. The point I was attempting to make in my last letter and am now attempting to clarify in this letter is that these two, to me, are interchangeable; their souls have been darkened by this irredeemable devil you've referenced. Gilbert (so all of us) darkness, for instance, is personified by the presence of this inner-demon. Whether he surrendered the battle long ago from exhaustion, or whether he's been oblivious of its presence from the beginning, it's clear that Gilber does not have control over his demonic side. Rather, he is controlled by it. It's my understanding that we all have some sort of negative spirit or demon within us. (Side note: Have any of you read Martin Buber's On Hasidism and/or seen My Dinner with Andre? There's this point in the dinner conversation when Wally's just described acting alongside a Czech in a previous play. He explains the reverence with which this actor viewed the performance, as if it were a sacred event. This reverence extended past his individual role in the play, extending itself in the form of respect to each of his fellow actors. Andre, Wally's sole dinner companion, interjects and lays on the Buber: He relates this Czech man's personhood to the Hasidic idea that every moment is to be sacramentalized. You see, the Hasidics believe that there are spirits chained in everything. In you, in me, in the inanimate objects surrounding us. The act of praying, Buber writes (and Andre says), is how we liberate these spirits. This, Andre suggests, is why every action of ours ought to be lived as a prayer, a joyful sacrament. Andre opines this is an uncommon way of living because abstaining from such mindfulness is how we cope with our realities in the world, he says and I agree, that were most of us to confront our actions, we'd find our existences far too nauseating to endure.)

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 3 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

10. (Continued) You yearn for brotherly, for sisterly love. You yearn to love others and you yearn to fulfill your earthly potential, seeing it for what it truly is: a gift from the heavens. To yearn for these things, no matter at the moment, signifies, to me, that your path remains illuminated through your unrelenting faith. Having seen the path so clearly at all, you suffer from anguish each time you realize your actions, thoughts, as well as the corrective actions and thoughts of humanity, have again lead you and all of us away from it. (note: revisit Ubuntuism in next letter--"I am because you are.") I think the foundation and frequency of your self-judgments reveal how deeply your faith has seeped into your essence. To exist as a Catholic is to follow the rules through your actions because that's what you're told to do. Generally, these existences are founded and dictated on guilt, fear, and obligation; their existence as Catholics preceded their essence as Catholics. To be Catholic in essence (correction: your faith hasn't "seeped into your essence," it is your essence) is to organize your very being not around these "rules," but through them through you. It is to feel your faith, not just act out your faith. It is to suffer with mind, body, soul, to feel the failure so deeply that it becomes a part of you. This is a tremendous blessing, you see, but it is and can only remain a fruitful blessing when balanced with the following understanding: habitual failing does not define us as permanent failures. We must love both ourselves and one another in our successes and most importantly we must love both ourselves and one another through our failures. We must be kind; we must be patient. Though it's of great importance that we're always aligned with our path or in the process of making our way back toward it, it's perhaps of even greater importance that we acknowledge the impracticality of never stumbling at from it all. This sounds like a lazy and self-interested approach to personifying our faith, yes, but once again I will ask you to exercise your patience with me as I sift through this rubble I've created in search of a treasure worth sharing.
11. We must strive for perfection with all of our body and all of our soul, but we must do this with the understanding that we will never reach perfection on this earth. What is life if not a journey toward perfection? Take the Sanskrit root for "to be" for instance. bhū́ → भू. Did you know it's the same as the root of "to grow" and "to dwell on Earth (not in Heaven)"? Did you know that's the meaning of this life? I can't stress enough how much this being human is a process, and a trying one at that. Each of us is no more than a work in progress, or as my boy Rumi says, a guest house. And, like that, I've found my next point or rather it's found me. Why I say your faith is "unrelenting." Why I say you've seen the face of God and now you must live in separation from it.
12. So these "failures" to be patient, loving, and kind are agents of personal (and collective) growth. They're in our lives to illuminate our routes back to our paths. To revisit Rumi once more, EACH OF THESE FAILURES HAS BEEN SENT AS A GUIDE FROM BEYOND! Entertain them all. I was by NO means referring to you as a conservative, Art. Nor was I referring to myself as a radical. I found the essays meaningful, and thought they related nicely to something or other at the time. Sorry for the miscommunication though it seems as though you ultimately benefited from it by replacing the presumed periods with open-ended question marks. In Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Have you read/re-read it yet, Will?), he writes of how we all enter school as question marks and leave school as periods. I both love and despise this observation and it's through this love and through this hate that I welcome any moment that stirs us from the tranquil comfort of the period of thinking we have tried the answers. There's a danger in comfort→danja, danja, high voltage!

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 2 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

5. But, of course, we frequently feel called to explain our beliefs, for we exist in a civilization in which existence is characterized by disbelief, skepticism, cynicism, ironic self-detachment, and so on. To that, I write this: To believe in something fiercely enough to defend it in the face of persecution, laughter, and cruel judgment is half the battle's triumph already. But that's only the good news. The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news is that the other half of the battle is far more grueling; this half will be plagued by constant failure, punctuated with frequent doubts, and will wound us beyond recognition. It's this half of the battle in which we must transmute our internal into the external realities of our day to day lives.
6. Let's lighten the tone a bit, shall we? Moving onto this next Roman numerated point hints at progress already, though not because the murky waters are behind us. Rather because the murky waters are all around us, yet here we still are paddling on nonetheless. We've not yet drowned, and I assure you of our safety in staying afloat as long as we each remember: none of us are perfect, nor will we ever be.
7. There will, of course, be many times in which our actions veer from the path made straight by our beliefs. And Art, you're absolutely right. Burning bridges, habitual impatience, the inability to personify the values our beliefs set forth for us are all, indeed, wayward of our path. However, I included the "Life in the Womb" excerpt in my last note in hopes of emphasizing this point exactly. (key words: in hopes). Yes. We will fail my friends. Yes, at times we will act in discordance with our beliefs. Yes, we will most certainly sin during this lifetime despite our greatest efforts not to. Yet, what matters most, we must try all the same. In remembering our earthly imperfections, we must renew our hope through the understanding that we will never fail nor fall to depths too deep to ascend. The path will always be waiting to welcome us back to our motorized home upon it, so long as our beliefs resist eviction from their permanent home within.
8. I can't stress enough how much this being human is a process, and a trying one at that. Each of us is no more than a work in progress, or as my boy Rumi says, a guest house. And, like that, I've found my next point or rather it's found me. Why I say your faith is "unrelenting." Why I say you've seen the face of God and now you must live in separation from it.
9. I say the above no because in O'Connor's words you "lead a holy life." I say this instead to highlight how cognizant you are that you do not. You don't claim to be a saint. You remain grounded in humility because you recognize the struggles. And what is more, you recognize the frequent failures within these struggles. I say this because you see your failures as failures and you yearn to make them right. You yearn for God's love.

In Atlas's globe: 

Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably.

We Go Medieval on the Seventies

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 4 September 2015.

Detail of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch

Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.

Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.

Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.

We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."

Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.

But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.

At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.

Chinatown

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 26 August 2015.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown

Art:

What a great movie. I'd never seen it before and I was interested in it because Baudrillard was interested in it. But I started watching it from the standpoint of some of the things we've discussed in the project.  

What I liked about it was how J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is such the epitome of that cocky, rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject, and how the vaguely exotic "Chinatown"—though never visited until the final scene—plays the stereotypical role of the inarticulate, fathomless backdrop against which he suffers.  

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is a modern Ophelia of sorts, one who has fully plumbed the depths of the formless horror, demonstrated by the fact that she has multiple Chinese servants and a daughter through an apparently consensual act of incest with her father. 

Interestingly, she also has a Oedipal hole in her iris (later, through her eye). Gittes' memories of his own time in Chinatown suggest that he witnessed something—both within and without—that he has since tried to forget. Gittes has tried to "uncollapse" that experience; Evelyn lives within that collapse. 

In short, it's another Nietzschean/Baudrillardian tragedy. And J.J. Gittes reminds me a lot of Will Witkowski.

Will:

Crazy! I just started watching it on Netflix for the first time the other day! Unfortunately, I put it on at 3:30 a.m. and fell asleep while watching it. Time to watch it again! 

Come to think of it, from what I saw, there is also a parallel in the backdrop of at least the beginning, which is that a major metropolis will face total collapse (lack of water). You know, it's San Francisco instead of Detroit, so the crisis is more direct and less interesting than Detroit's looming threat (the lodestone), but still. 

You are right that young Will must have been like Gittes. I wonder what failure after failure would turn Gittes into. 

I think about the idea that the Witkowski family is so vastly important, and that all human beings are so vastly important that Jesus dies for all of us. But then we get all this Horatio Algerian rah-rah pablum all the time about following our dreams and being anything we want and determine your own fate and be a self-made man B.S. and we see ourselves as important for all the wrong reasons and abandon our rightful posts as agents of God's light and wander off into Palookaville with our bindles like we're hot stuff and think we're so important when we're just Goofy slipping on a banana peel. 

And meanwhile, God is still working with us where we're at and we're still so important, even though we're Billy Madison coming down late for dinner after getting into a fight with shampoo and conditioner bottles in the bathtub.

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.

Call Me By My True Names

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

Thich Nhat Hanh

Continuing on to some of your other letters, I see that you interpreted my question--"to what extent does reflecting 'the devil we are possessed by' necessitate identifying with that devil?"--with "devil" meaning enemy, as in Donald Trump or Dan Gilbert. And indeed, the tendency in our polarized time is to demonize anyone who is not on my side. The spiritual practice you recommend is a good one, akin to metta, or loving-kindness, meditation practiced in Theravada Buddhism.

So I agree. But we also have an obligation to stop people who, for whatever reason, think they have a right to kill other people--starting with the weakest and most innocent and working our way up from there. Otherwise any commitment to loving-kindness becomes incoherent.

I should clarify that what I meant was identifying with actual, damned, irredeemable devils. The souls of Donald Trump and Dan Gilbert are still "in play." But maybe what you and I are talking about is a distinction without a difference.

My point is that the artist and mystic, following in the footsteps of Christ, operates in a much more "collapsed" reality than do other crusaders.

In some mysterious sense, he identifies his own sin as fundamental, as constitutive of the world's problems. So if babies are being dismembered, it is because I am in some sense a dismemberer of babies. I am Pharaoh, I am Herod. I am so unwilling to allow Moses or Christ into this world that I kill everything that resembles him within myself and others. This sentiment is not unlike the one expressed in Thich Nhat Hanh's poem, "Call Me By My True Names":

Call Me by My True Names 

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive. 

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. 

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive. 

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly. 

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog. 

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. 

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. 

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp. 

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans. 

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one. 

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

On the Side of Life

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

Albert Camus

Thank you for sharing Peter Maurin's distinction between liberals and radicals. Of course, the same distinction could be made between conservatives and radicals, which may point to the fact that both are (were once?) rooted in similar bedrock principles. To make matters even more confusing, I used the terms "the left" and "the right" as in socialists and nationalists, which themselves have different meanings.

In defending your own position as not liberal but radical and then pointing out the follies of conservatism, I wonder if you were seeing me as a conservative (I wasn't seeing you as a liberal by the way). I don't think that fits me any more than it did Camus when Sartre and company ostracized him for not getting on the Communist bandwagon, turning a blind eye to its brutality. I am not in married to any ideas about the free market, trickle-down economics, strong military, small government, right to bear arms, greed, Don Gilber, etc.

As Camus said somewhere, "I am on the side of life."

I almost want to just leave it at that, because that's all there is to it for me. It is the simplest, most coherent of all positions, constitutive of all other values.

Now, I may need to understand that position more deeply, to integrate it more completely. But more contemplation, more sanctification, more poverty and/or personal fidelity to the Gospel will never change the fact that I am on the side of life. And not just on the level of the "fundamental option," but categorically (more on that later). Camus, who carried the philosophical project started by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through to its most harrowing, coherent conclusions, arrived at this certainty. Dostoevsky seems to have finally arrived at a similar conclusion in his final short story (I read about this today on Brainpickings). And so have all of the saints.

Of course, it isn't fashionable to talk about the negative moral precepts associated with "I am on the side of life," namely, "Thou shalt not kill." After all, we're not supposed to be close-minded. But as Chesterton famously wrote,

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing.

The Church has always affirmed the existence of negative moral precepts. St. Pope John Paul II states this unequivocally in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor,

In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behavior as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the "creativity" of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.

He contrasts this commonsense theological understanding with a perversion of the "so-called fundamental option," the idea that "freedom is not only the choice for one or another particular action; it is also, within that choice, a decision about oneself and a setting of one's own life for or against the Good, for or against the Truth, and ultimately for or against God." All of this, he says, has been an important and positive development in moral theology. But certain theorists have taken this line of thinking too far:

In some authors this division tends to become a separation, when they expressly limit moral "good" and "evil" to the transcendental dimension proper to the fundamental option, and describe as "right" or "wrong" the choices of particular "innerworldly" kinds of behavior: those, in other words, concerning man's relationship with himself, with others and with the material world. There thus appears to be established within human acting a clear disjunction between two levels of morality: on the one hand the order of good and evil, which is dependent on the will, and on the other hand specific kinds of behavior, which are judged to be morally right or wrong only on the basis of a technical calculation of the proportion between the "premoral" or "physical" goods and evils which actually result from the action. This is pushed to the point where a concrete kind of behavior, even one freely chosen, comes to be considered as a merely physical process, and not according to the criteria proper to a human act. The conclusion to which this eventually leads is that the properly moral assessment of the person is reserved to his fundamental option, prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behavior.

Of course, the Church teaches that there are certain intrinsically evil acts that cannot be done with your "heart in the right place." Certain acts, by their very nature, constitute a decision against God, a "no" to God. We know these as mortal sins. And though the Church acknowledges certain psychologically complex situations which may mitigate guilt, these are never normative.

Help My Unbelief

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

Flannery O'Connor

Later in your letters, you kindly affirm that my struggles are "symptomatic of a faith so unrelenting it's seeped beyond your existence and into your essence." Let me disabuse you of these notions with a quote from Flannery O'Connor's letters:

For you to think this would be possible because of your ignorance of me; for me to think this would be sinful in a high degree. I am not a mystic and I do not lead a holy life. Not that I can claim any interesting or pleasurable sins (my sense of the devil is strong) but I know all about the garden variety, pride, gluttony, envy and sloth, and what is more to the point, my virtues are as timid as my vices. I think sin occasionally brings one closer to God, but habitual sin and not this petty kind that blocks every small good.

Lest you waste any more of your precious time trying to rescue me from spiritual despondency, I also believe what she says next:

However, the individual in the Church is, no matter how worthless himself, a part of the Body of Christ and a participator in the Redemption. There is no blueprint that the Church gives us for understanding this. It is a matter of faith and the Church can force no one to believe it. When I ask myself how I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter (sic), Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And all I can say about my love of God is, Lord help me in my lack of it.

Catholic Church'ing?

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

Dorothy Day

Okay, here goes. Just about everything is in agreement with what you've said. But before I started typing everything out like I said I would, lots of things started coming to mind. I knew I just needed to just get it all down.

I'm actually starting (mostly) with the first "Haunted by God" illuminated letter.

I want to first address the question of communicating as widely as possible. This is something I may have worried about earlier, but I've come around. I have a somewhat obvious realization about the four of us (and actually the 6 of us if we open it up to Father and Max): we are all Roman Catholics--post-Vatican II ones--and a fairly representative ideological slice at that. Due to this, our communications are a participation in the Body of Christ, the Church.

Inasmuch as God does not desire "that any should perish" (2 Peter 3:9), all people participate in this reality. Furthermore, due to the fact the Spirit "blows where it wills" (John 3:8) and that Jesus has "other sheep that do not belong to this fold" (John 10:6), we must think of the reality of the Church in the widest sense, indeed--as with all things Catholic--"according to the whole." So I agree with you when you quote Dorothy Day's words: "Many who serve Him officially have never known who He was, and many who do not even know His name, will hear on the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy." St. Augustine says something similar in his City of God.

That said, I don't think it is presumptuous to assume that we have a privileged position due to our closeness to the Church and the Sacraments instituted by Christ. Christ seems to be speaking directly to us as Catholics when he says, "Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more" (Luke 12:48).

If you more or less agree with what I've written here, I'm going on to the similarly banal, obvious point that we, as Catholics, should do everything we can to stick together as the Body of Christ. Lots about that in the daily readings in recent days, perhaps most clearly in St. Paul's beautiful exhortation in Ephesians 4:1-6:

Unity in the Body. 

I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace:
one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

And I'm not good at this. I am a big burner of bridges and have a polemical side to my personality. Of course, plenty of our saints have suffered from this as well, and God has used it to build the Church. As I've said before, we're always building one of three buildings: the Church, the Pyramids, or the Tower of Babel. All too often, I've been building the latter two: pressing others into service and/or collaborating with others, both for prideful reasons. As we know from these stories and from our own personal experiences, both lead to scattering of minds, confusion of tongues, cacophony: the opposite of the unity proper to the Body of Christ.

So, long story short, I agree that we should keep cc'ing (Catholic Church'ing?).

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 6 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

More Dorothy Day:

Is suffering and death, and the strength to bear them, all there is in this struggle? This search for God would be a pretty grim affair if this were all, and transcendence too high a goal for simple folk. 

Let us remember other elements too. 

“What is it that I love when I love my God,” St. Augustine cried out in his Confessions. It is a certain light that I love and melody and fragrance and embrace that I love when I love my God–a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the God-within, where for my soul, that shines which space does not contain; that sounds which time does not sweep away; that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel, and that tastes sweet which, fed upon, is not diminished, and that clings close which no satiety disparts–this is what I love when I love my God." 

And Catherine of Siena assures us that “all the way to Heaven is Heaven, because He said, I am the Way.”

This is all to say, by restructuring your perspective on your suffering (and this goes for all of us), I think you'll soon discover that these burdens are blessings. In one of Day's most moving passages, she refers to our slow and painful procession toward death (what St. Paul called "the body of death") as "a life in the womb."

A life in the womb! What a fine perspective!

I have such a fondness for this particular outlook on our journey that it reminds me, and I frequently need to be reminded, that every moment of every hour of every day we are still growing, still learning, still failing, still succeeding in these failures, sprinting decades backward only to crawl one scoot forward. And all our lives, this is how it will be. Do babies give up when they toddle over, subjecting themselves from that first fall forward to a life of self-willed paralysis? Of course not.

That's silly to ask, even rhetorically. But what are we now if not babies in the womb caught in the amber of preparation for that glorious day when we are "released from bondage," the moment we "at last burst out into glorious day?" And how many are there among us who impose that spiritual paralysis upon ourselves after falling but once from our elevated state of grace in the garden?