You Will Set the World Ablaze

The following is an email sent from Art to Will and Joe on 29 March 2016.

Captain Nemo playing the organ aboard the Nautilus

I'm trying to remain positive, but I haven't been in a naturally positive place.

Saw my uncle yesterday and we talked about a young recording artist that he knows—and about the near impossibility of breaking in to anything with that style of music. Then he brought up his usual question, what is your niche, what are the three things that you can do that no one else can?

And while questions like these tend to bounce off of me like so many cannonballs off the hull of Captain Nemo's Nautilus, I suppose he has a point.

Maybe those are the right questions to ask. Maybe those questions miss the point entirely.

Maybe we need a different category of question. One other possible category is what positives does the project engender, both in our own lives and in the lives of others? One thing is that the project has gotten me to read a lot more, practice a lot more, stay in touch with others a lot more. I'd even say it's deepened my faith life. I honestly don't know what others get out of it.

That brings me back to the question from before: what are the three things that we can do that no one else can? Just speaking for myself, I won't be remembered as a musician, songwriter, playwright, performer, philosopher, or theologian. Those are not my niches and it's too late to catch up at this point.

As I think about it, I see a key to this question in the story of Arthur White. Arthur White was a mystic whose brother tried to fry it out of him with ECT. How many mystics have had their mysticism fried out of them by our electronic age!

I think our niche may be that we believe our primary job is to penetrate the mystery of our lives. That none of the facts of our existence are mere coincidences, that God has a special message and mission for each one of us. And that everything will follow from penetrating to the core of that message written into the very substance of our being. Thus, “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt 6:33).

I say penetrating the mystery of our lives is the same as seeking the Kingdom of God because of Luke 17:20. Tolstoy's translation for his book is “The Kingdom of God is within you.” The New American Bible is “The Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20). Obviously, the latter is more Catholic in that it implies that the Kingdom of God is found in community, not in each separate individual.

That confirms for me some of the best things that have come out of the project. It goes along with the Married Couple's Prayer ideal of a “holy rivalry.” Just to keep up with you all, I've read a lot of the books you've read (I'm reading The Power and the Glory now). Now Liza is introducing a new standard, that of being a true artist and contemplative.

So, I'm getting some ideas about our “niche.” One is a belief that God has a special message and mission for each one of us, written into the very substance of our being. Two is a belief that the Kingdom of God is found among us, not in our isolated individuality.

We necessarily steer this question of niche back to the issue of God's will. The niche emerges insofar as we penetrate the mystery of our lives. I would say that's true for everyone, but most especially for us. On some level, we've always held that as our criterion. What does this mean for the project? Liza models this for us in her dispersed excursion to the Keweenaw and in her countercultural lifestyle generally.

I recall John Paul's Letter to Artists:

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.

Not to mention this:

...if you are what you should be—that is, if you live Christianity without compromise—you will set the world ablaze.

I've got to get to bed, but I'm beginning to think that the next step in the project would be to go on retreat and ratchet up our spiritual lives. The power of the project lies in rivalry.

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.