Flight of a butterfly

The experience of truth is not found in the distance that is the modern paradigm of knowing:  an object seen from afar, possessed (or made) through "subjection" by a subject.  Is is,

rather something that happens to us and in which we participate, as when we get caught up in a game.  Truth happens when we lose ourselves and no longer stand over against it as a subject against an object.  When we are caught up in the game that is played with us, it is then, even before we are aware of it, that we have joined in the continuing event of truth.

 V. Stanley Benfell, The Biblical Dante, at p. 10 (quoting Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of 'Truth and Method', 258).

There is an irreducibility about Truth, of which Christ is the paradigm.  One cannot dominate Truth; one must give it play and surrender (give oneself over) to it.  Truth is found through docility, being led, taught, mastered, by Truth's maestro. True transcendence is true delivery of self to the Other.

Surrender is difficult, so has many simulacra. We have a bag full of tricks to avoid true surrender, so we can have our cake and eat it too: a pseudo-transcendence of immediacy and control.  Our passions abetted by fantasies cook up all sorts of tasty morsels to be claimed and digested while we give truth lip service. "Lay off, I'm Hungry!!!" is the refrain from Chris Farley's famous skit of the fat lady on a diet scrambling for french fries.

Surrender (giving of ourselves over to Truth) or submission (accepting a lesser role in a larger mission) lies at the heart of matter: do we claim our birthright or sell it for a mess of pottage?  As Julian Carron asks in 2012 Exercises, p. 55, do we "barter[] belonging to Jesus for a love relationship or our career[?]"

Wendell Berry has much to say about this question.  In an essay "Poetry and Marriage," he compares the discipline of each and the proper "form" to which each must submit to find free and fulfilled expression.  Form is the "bed" in which the stream of life runs, if we allow it, rather than to let our life flow everywhere or anywhere.  Form is determined by culture and tradition, and gives life and freedom.

 It is precisely the form of marriage with its constraints and boundaries, according to Berry, that necessitates the development of such excellences of character which liberate married persons to make of their marriage the full-bodied, loving communion of bodies and souls that it can be. Here again it is form, the form that "enforces freedom" which enables them to discover the crucial "unforseen belongings" of their lives. 

"Cultural and Natural Forms in the Thought of Wendell Berry," lloyd W. J. Aultman-Moore, p. 122.

Thruth and freedom, by this way of thinking, are not found in releasing oneself in a river of passion or emotion, but in careful and sometimes painful adherence to the given forms of truth through which true freedom is realized.  This is the true surrender, submission, giving up, that leads to freedom.  What is gained? the Irreducible Truth, whose form is Christ.

As Dante expressed it, the flight of a butterfly is only possible if the grub undergoes chrysalis.

To See You More Clearly/ To Follow You More Nearly

To "be" in the world involves a blend of passivity and action: We bring our history and our yearnings (past and future) to the present moment, which we accept but read (interpret).  I was reminded of this recently at a restaurant when one of us three looked around and asked, "Where is the pepper?"  I looked and saw the familiar glass and silver-topped salt shaker but could not find any pepper.  It took the third of us to say, "Oh, it is a pepper mill," as he pulled the tall wooden mill out of the condiment tray in the center of the table.  Looking for a pepper shaker, I couldn't see a pepper mill.

So what we look for is pretty important, isn't it?  What we discover is what we choose to uncover.  The man looking for his lost coin only under the streetlamp may be disappointed.  That's why Giussani stresses the need for openness, and a breaking open of our predilections.  The image he uses is the little child, who approaches the world with an attitude of curiosity. Since what we experience "out there" is mixed with what is "in here," it isn't difficult to see why Giussani observes that:

"reality is made transparent in experience.  What we are, the nature of our heart, is made evident in our relationship with reality. . ." 

"It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who Lives in Me," p. 54.  In other words, we discover ourselves in the world's disclosure. "[T]he heart [what I desire] is implicated in what it experiences." Ibid.  The world doesn't appear unless I allow it to address me.  Giussani says (quoting Reinhold Niebuhr), "I will never find an answer to a question I do not ask."  Our fundamental desires (our questions and search for meaning) thus are significant to the degree that they match rather than turn away from the signs appearing in reality. "People rarely learn what they believe they already know." Ibid. p. 29, quoting Barbara Ward.

One's desire, then, is crucial, since one only recognizes what comports to one's desire.  Giussani's basic message is that we need to open the channel of our desire through active purification of our "heart" so we can experience what is truly and nobly desirable for man as man, namely, the Divine, whose divine-human form is the person of Jesus Christ.  Following an inferior (infernal) way does not satisfy, for it isn't consonant with the innate nobility of human desire.

This way of thinking, the human being as in essence exstasis, self-transcending, is as old as human thinking.  "The ultimate end of the motion of all being is the 'attainment of a divine likeness'." St. Thomas Aquinas (quoted in Rbt. Spaemann, "Human Nature," at p. 16.  This truth about man and nature, the desire to transcend itself, was recognized by Aristotle. Methexis (participation in the eternal and divine) is the end toward which all things strive. Ibid.

Our job as human beings then is to desire more nobly, i.e. to desire the good, true and beautiful, lamps of the transcendent realm that light the path to the Primum Mobile and the Empyrean, in Dante's words in the Divine Comedy.  Dante follows Giussani (and vice versa) in encouraging a "way of purgation" so that our channels of desire run clearly and fully toward that which truly and fully satisfies.

The path to that divine likeness, the path out of the "dark wood in the middle of our lives," then, is an active via of purification of desire, so that we learn to want to see truly, to live freely, through the heart.  The via, the way, the exodus, to Truth and Life is shown to us by Jesus, who is that way, truth and life.  So that when we travel this way we meet Christ's loving gaze, and recognize who we truly are.

A Meandering Stream of Love

Yesterday's readings offer a wonderful image of the importance of hearing and doing, and the loving submission that motivates and inspires real action.   In the gospel, Jesus says (Luke 8:21) that closest to him (like mothers and brothers and sisters) are those who hear his word and act on it.  Those who hear and put his word into action become family to him.  The first reading (Prv. 21: 1-6, 10-13) gives a lovely description of what that means.  "Like a stream is the king's heart in the hand of the Lord; wherever it pleases him, he directs it." What a moving image of how the Holy Spirit guides the willing actor.   To those who put their hearts in God's hands are vouchsafed the true freedom of meandering continuously like a stream on a trail of love blazed by the "gravity" of God's grace. In such a life, to the extent we can lead it, we can say, as did Theresa of the Child Jesus, that, "[w]hen I am charitable it is only Jesus who is acting in me."  Quoted in Giussani's talk, "In the Simplicity of my heart I have gladly given you everything."

La Caridad Nos Une

I heard an interview yesterday on Relevant Radio of a woman named Terri who accompanied Benedict VI on his trip to Cuba earlier this year.  Terri, now a U.S. citizen without a trace of Spanish accent, grew up in a family who had fled from Cuba before or during Fidel Castro's revolution.  Visiting Cuba again was a powerful experience for her.

But one of the most impactful memories was a comment a Cuban Catholic woman made to her just as she was leaving: "La caridad nos une." (Charity unites us.)  I thought, how nicely this captures our own relationships in mission with fellow Catholics throughout the world.  And of course, how appropriate for our relationships with our neighbors here in the U.S.

Fathers and Daughters

Tribune columnist John Kass's column today decries a single mother who, since she has no husband, protested the school father-daughter dance as unfair and discriminatory, and perpetuating the stereotype of an "Ozzie and Harriet" family with a mom and a dad.  The ACLU intervened and the school caved, cancelling the dance.  Read the article here.

It's hard not to grind one's teeth at this, shall we call it, political correctness?  (I thought the woman's position could be made even stronger if she pointed out that if she was a lesbian, and had another mother for the child instead of a father, that second mother was also being discriminated against!)

How do we get past this nonsense?  John Kass suggests we are in sore need of common sense, and I agree with that.  But how to get it back?

I am reading a book about Dante (Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation, Christine O'Connell Bauer, at p. 141-142) in which the author explains that we find meaning in our lives by being receptive and being active.  Either extreme should be avoided.  Pure passivity (accepting without question "what happens to me") gives no meaning.  The other extreme, activity, runs the risk of heresy, whereby the world is bent to my desires.  The answer is some mixture, tending to a mean (I suppose) of passivity and activity.  Dante describes these ingredients as humility and pride.  Life's journey toward meaning is one of tempering pride with humility, a journey requiring thinking and action, prudence and temperance, justice and courage.  (And Dante includes at a higher level, the theological or infused virtues.)  Only then is meaning -- meaning an atunement with reality and NOT insanity -- realizable.

How does this apply to the circumstances related in Kass' column?  Common sense is the term we use for that "mean" approach avoiding the extreme of pride (of trying to bend the world to my hallucination or fantasy).  As Kass said, a bit of thinking would have led the mom to realize she could find a surrogate father in an uncle or other relative.  This sense can also be said to be "common" because it is shared by others.  Through common sense we live in a world inhabited by others, and not in our own world of fantasy, to which the real world must bend.  To be "common" in this sense is not to be low, but to participate in the shared world the common currency of which is respect, charity, and forgiveness.

How can we help?  Try to bring in common sense.  Show that the fight against victimization often only creates more victims.

To Have and to Hold

Psychology treats of how we experience the world and ourselves in it. Ontology is the study of what is. Are the two connected? Certainly, but not one to one. In fact, what we experience psychologically may be the opposite of what is really happening. Our experience of appearances can be deceiving.

I came across a remarkable example. Robert Spaemann points to the distinction in his treatment of love and sexuality. Our sexual drive is part of the natural world. But persons are human beings in whom reason coexists with but governs nature. Spaeman puts it this way: "Personhood is not the same thing as being governed by reason. Reason together with the nature of animal drives is that human nature in which the person appears. The personal way to have a nature is the governance of reason in life."

This hierarchy of nature and reason applies not only individually but in our relations with others, since, as Spaemann says, "Personhood exists only in the plural. To be a person means to occupy a place in the universal, trans-temporal community of persons."

Sexuality becomes "personal" (and not a symbol of depersonalization) if (and only if) it "is embedded in that unconditional, irreversible, and exclusive mutual self-giving of two persons, indeed of two persons whose different sexual physis is already ordered toward such a union. . . . Embedded in such a personal union, the submersion of the self in the act of intercourse becomes a symbolic realization of personal self-transcendence." Spaemann, "The Paradoxes of Love," at pp. 23-24.

Reasons's governance is needed to orient sexuality to its proper meaning and end. We call this self-mastery. But the outcome is beautiful: "In the concrete unity of love, the lovers do not disappear, but rather are elevated to the highest level of their possibilities."

Love requires self-mastery and self-sacrifice. "We speak of overcoming oneself, of self-denial and of dying with Christ. . . . What we experience psychologically as self-denial is ontologically a self-realization and rising of the person. The Gospel expresses it this way, 'He who wants to save his soul will lose it, but he who gives it up, will save it.'"

And so, when we do battle to maintain self-mastery, we should try to keep in mind that the negative psychological experience (of resisting tempation) is wonderfully positive ontologically: We are becoming real persons!

God's Glory This Day

Oh Glorious Day of God's Grandeur:
Oriental saphire sky, green leaves
Turning yellow in my fingers,
The late summer breeze caresses.
Where did you come from, and where are you
Going, evanescent beauty?
My hands open in welcome,
And wave goodbye
To Your eternal gratuity
Of love.

Imagination, a Road to Delusion or Reality?

Imagination, or the image-making faculty of man, can err in the direction of fantasy, the multiplication willy-nilly of unreal images. It finds its true path when it is open to a reality beyond image: the necessary, the eternal.

In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, the lunatic, the lover and the poet are described as "of imagination all compact," meaning they are dominated by their overactive imaginations, nowhere near the real world. But Boris Pasternak had a different view of imagination. He viewed art as being "possessed" by . . . reality. "For me art is a possession, and the artist is a man stricken, possessed by reality." (quoted in The Language of Mystery, Edward Robinson, at p. 15.)

How are we to understand these seemingly contradictory statements? Does imagination lead one into flights of fancy or into reality?

Robinson explains that fantasy and delusion are linked by an ego that creates the world (if only temporarily) in its own mind. You've heard the put-down phrase, "He is a legend in his own mind." A fantasizing person uses his image-making power to gratify his ego. "My fantasy is the product of all the desires, fears and frustrations by which, consciously or unconsciously, I am motivated. I am constantly driven by them. In real life I cannot let them have their head, but . . . in privacy . . . I can let them loose. I may even think of this as therapeutic; I may feel it does me a world of good to let my feelings take over for the time being. Here at least I need set no bounds to my self-indulgence; here at least I am completely free. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. . . . This is the danger we run when we abandon ourselves to fantasy: we remain ego-bound." Ibid, p. 19.

But there is another way to use imagination. It is, as Robert Sokolowski explains, to find necessities. By examining different imagined possibilities, one can arrive at what by necessity cannot be, and what must be. The "thought experiments" of scientists have produced a wealth of insight into the way things have to be. Einstein imagined what it must be like to ride on a ray of light, realizing that space and time had to "bend" in relation to this absolute. Sokolowski (and phenomenology) call these thought experiments "imaginative variations" through which truth can emerge. "If some writers can use their imaginations to generate insight into what has to be, they help us see the eternal things." Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 181.

This takes us the distance to Pasternak, who saw imagination as a vehicle to being possessed of reality. Thankfully, not every imagined thing is possible. There are truths and necessities that can ground us. Not only scientific, they also relate to our daily life and to the life of the divine world beyond all imagining. And we can discover these through our imagination.