Acrobats in Life

Last Sunday we spent with friends at a lake and during a morning boat ride, our friends' son did some neat tricks on a slalom ski. As he crossed the boat wake he used the up side of the wake to get enough momentum to do a side flip and land again on his skis on the other side of the wake. He looked like an acrobat on water! Later he told us that he learned this as a high schooler (he is in his upper 20s now) and it took a lot of tries and spills. He said the key was to use the ski line attached to the boat as a pivot point as it pulled him forward. The flexible nylon ski line tethering him to the boat was what enabled him to perform his pretty amazing acrobatic feat!

I thought of that when I read a reference to "the Nietzschean dream of a 'free spirit' coupled with a 'tethered heart'" in "The Regime of Separatism" in Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, by Earnest L. Fortin (at p.10).

Here's what Nietzsche said in Aphorism 87 in Beyond Good and Evil: "Tethered heart, free spirit -- If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties: I have said that once before. But one does not believe me, unless one already knows it --"

What a nice image the water skier is of the freedom that comes from our religion. By linking ourselves to our Lord and our God we find the tether we need to perform amazing acrobatics in life, to truly become"free spirits."

Unity of Thought

One of the paths of our discussion at our last meeting was the idea of community as being an essential part of the Christian personality and our obligation to the "Other". This line of thought is laid out in a quote from the  book, Sages and Dreamers, written by Elie Wiesel. The idea draws even tighter the bond between Christians and Jews and their practical spirituality. It also has a very important meaning for us who "study" the Christian Spirit.

"A hero in the Talmud is someone who works on his own spiritual development for the sake of others. Someone who dwells in his own garden, alone, is not heroic. Had Moses stayed in heaven, he would have become our prophet but not our teacher. Had Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai remained in the cave, he would have kept his vision to himself. Learning is important to the individual person – but to share it is more important. … Because in learning, man can always go higher and higher. When it comes to learning, the more one gives, the more one receives. Hence the emphasis in the Talmud on study and good deeds. Theology matters less than human relations."

St. Ephrem & St. Augustine

St Ephrem lived just a little before St. Augustine. Augustine was born in 354 AD and St Ephrem died in 393 AD.

Consider the contrast between each one’s effort at describing God.

St. Ephrem, from TSF45 (Teaching-Songs on Faith)

Greatness would be small, were the Great contained;
Fatherhood a fraud, were He barren, too;
Isness impotent, could He not create.
He is whole in all respects:
bearing with no pain; making with no work;
dwelling in no space; wealthy with no gold.

Space does not exist great enough to enclose
Him, nor intellect sharp enough to probe.
Great in Isness, He; great in Fatherhood.
Space and mind accept defeat.
As there is no space equal to his Being,
so there is no mind equal to that Birth.

How He made a thing, when there was no thing,
intellect cannot fathom, but it's true.
How to demonstrate that it can be done?
Logic has no space for this.
Give your mind repose! Say: 'This is the way
I, by Faith, have stormed sharp Inquiry's hill.'

St. Augustine , from The Confessions:

What then is my God, what but the Lord God?
For Who is Lord but the Lord, or who is God but our God?
O You, the greatest and the best, mightiest, almighty,
most merciful and most just,
utterly hidden and utterly present,
most beautiful and most strong,
abiding yet mysterious,
suffering no change and changing all things:
never new, never old, making all things new,
bringing age upon the proud and they know it not;
ever in action, ever at rest,
gathering all things to Yourself and needing none;
sustaining and fulfilling and protecting,
creating and norishing and making perfect;
ever seeking though lacking nothing.
You love without subjection to passion,
You are jealous but not with fear,
You can know repentance but not sorrow,
be angry yet unperturbed by anger.
You can change the works You have made
but Your mind stands changeless.
You find and receive back what You have never lost;
are never in need but rejoice in Your gains,
are not greedy but exact interest manifold.
Men pay You more than is of obligation to win return from You,
yet who has anything that is not already Yours?
You owe nothing yet You pay as if in debt to Your creature,
forget what is owed to You yet do not lose thereby.
And with all this, what have I said,
my God, my Life and my sacred Delight?

St. Ephrem and the Probing Mind

Saint Ephraem, celebrated on June 9th, was a deacon and a doctor of the Church, who first exercised the office of preaching and of handing on sacred doctrine. He fulfilled his office through discourses and writings and in austerity of life, and so singular was he in doctrine that the exquisite hymns he composed merited for him the title “harp of the Holy Spirit.”

The above description is paraphrased from the one on the Bishop’s website. All his compositions were written in verse form. A few minutes on the web yielded the following stanza from an unpublished translation of his work, tantalizingly entitled TSF45.

How the eye detests that which makes it itch!
Curiosity irritates the mind,
as a crumb the eye, spoiling everything
and perverting thought, always.
Poking fingers hurt eyes and help them not.
Probing thinkers, too, harm their powers of thought.

Is St. Ephraem an old fuddy-duddy afraid of the new or does he have a point?

Wisdom from N. T. Wright

Reason is in short supply right now, and that is always dangerous. When everybody feels strongly that they know what to do, but nobody stops to think, you will sometimes find that common sense is prevailing; but you may also get lynchings, racist attacks and the cheerful abolition of ancient rights.

Reason is on the side of the angels. When someone says in a debate, What I feel is […]," the chair ought to intervene. What people feel is neither here nor there in a debate. If someone says "I like salt" and someone else says "I like pepper", they are not having a debate.

What matters is what they think. Sadly, it is possible for many people to feel strongly something which comes to be recognized as dangerous nonsense. The 20th century should have taught us that, if nothing else. Feelings are hugely important, but if we rely on them as our guid, we might as well take a compass bearing on a wild goat. When feelings rule, debaters become demagogues.

Much of our contemporary discourse – I sat through two days of general synod a week ago – had degenerated into a competition between the relative woundedness of people's feelings. I am not saying that wounded feelings do not matter, only that saying "I'm more hurt than you are" cannot settle and argument on a point of principle. Unfortunately, since victimhood is the only high moral ground left after the collapse of reasoned discourse, speeches become harangues, nae-calling replaces respectful engagement and party spirit trumps public wisdom. […]

There is a lot about postmodernism I like, but when it comes to the law of the land, I want words that say what they mean and mean what they say. This is necessary in order to build a society – or, indeed, a church – of trust, the precondition of genuine debate. You have to trust your opponents to say what they mean and mean what they say, and you have to earn their trust by doing the same.

Here again, contemporary culture lets us down. The hermeneutic of suspicion has become our default mode, encouraging us to lump issues into bundles and people into camps. It is much easier that way: it stops you have to think, or engage in real debate.

The Church desperately needs to learn once more the gentle art of reasoned discourse, of respectful engagement, of real debate. It is a better way to be Christian; it is a better way to be human. As Snoopy might have said, clarity ain't everything, but unclarity ain't anything.

--N. T. Wright

The gift of the poet

I rant at the TV news, bemoan the antics of our politicians and generally lament the world we adults are leaving our children. I spew it out in that old neighborhood, midwestern way of speaking, colorfully pepperd with an occasional expletive. When I'm done I just raise up my arms and say, "I hope the Holy Spirit knows what she's doing!."

This Saturday morning though, not having any children to define my schedule and turning a blind eye to all the work that needs to be done around the house, I grabbed a anthology of poetry, "Grace Notes". I think the author, Joseph Bottum, in his poem, Easer Morning, is lamenting as well though much more eloquently. Has he found hope in the promise of Easter?

These are the last three stanzas of his poem.

Touch-me-nots among the stones,
bluebells and sorrels, solomon’s seal.
Every spring pretends a pity
for all the pretty, short-lived things.
Last night I watched the fire zones,
the bombing plumes, the tracer rounds:
blooms of war on the TV news.
and now in these green trees I see
the graves of gods and a grove of bones

History labors – a worn machine
sick with torsion, ill-meshed ----
and every repair of an old fault
ruptures something new. The sacred
knife and prey are gone from the woods,
but winter’s blood still springs refreshed
and an altered world still summons death.
As long as we endure ourselves,
Innocence will come to grief
And mercy must remain unfleshed.

The parish bells begin their carols ---
Down through the trees like flourished prayer;
The Easter call resounding. Time
reaches forward, hungry for winter,
and what will save my daughter when even
hope is caught in the ancient snare?
A cold fear waits --- till all that had fallen,
all that was lost, rudely broken,
crossed in love, comes rising, rising
on the breath of the new spring air.