Looking Up

Leonard Cohen's "The Tower of Song" imagines the world of songwriting (and life) in its vertical dimension: among others, Hank Williams is "100 floors above me" in that tower.  Value sorts itself out in a hierarchy.  Aspiration seeks and sees the "greater good."  Jesus says, "Be perfect as my Father is perfect."  I scan that as meaning, aspire to the highest good; which in practice for us means stumbling and imperfection.  In another song, Cohen sings: "I fought against the bottle, but had to do it drunk.  Took my diamond to the pawnshop, but that don't make it junk."

Theresa of Avila's Way of Perfection counsels her nuns in prayer to "try to think and realize Whom you are about to address and continue to do so while you are addressing Him.  If we had a thousand lives, we should never fully understand how this Lord merits that we behave [correctly] toward him, before Whom even the angels tremble." p. 160 (Image edition).

To see the good, to value it, to experience it, to make it one's own, is the practice of love. Its dimensions include charity and forgiveness, caring and self-sacrifice.  Cohen sings, "Well my friends are gone, my hair is grey, I ache in the places where I used to play, and I'm crazy for love, but I'm not comin' on. I'm just paying my rent every day in the tower of song."

I know the sentiment.  My life's business is imperfection and loss intermixed with joy, and my way of perfection a plodding, myopic staring at the saints floors above me whom I want to beg to love me and draw me to them.  "Crazy for love, but not comin' on."  Dante also saw ascent as life's possibility, even though he too realized, in Cohen's words, that "fighting against the bottle, we usually do it drunk."  The via purgativa walks the way of loss, but its sweet fruit is a "Beatific" vision of our Christ, smiling with love.  Comin'?