Goats Love Too!

There was one thing that Darden could, indeed should, have done to clear out the love from his heart. He should have told himself “My father says I can’t marry her, Clopas says I will, but it is up to heaven to bring it about. It is best not to think of it.” In fact, Darden had said these things to himself, but he had not meant them. Everytime he had felt a little bad about himself, he had thought of Delilah and felt, for a moment, better. Later on, he would remember how much actually stood between him and her and he would begin to get worried. As he continued to rely on thoughts of her in times of sorrow, his worries sunk deeper into his heart until he felt very passionate about whether or not they would be together. He actually kind of liked this feeling of passion because it made him feel special. Soon he began to think about her even when he was happy, to add a little bit of feeling to something that was already beautiful. As a result not only his sorrows but also his joys became infected with the tortured thought of whether he and Delilah would be together. Instead of mowing down the little garden in his heart and fertilizing his love with the clippings, or, better yet, letting it grow and offering the fruits of his love back to heaven, Darden had decided to eat the fruits, to live off of them emotionally, though they did not yet belong to him.

Useful Distraction (could be a definition of Blogging)

http://www.cutsinger.net/wordpress2/?p=8

What is This One Thing Needful?

The soul is a tree whose roots are deeply imbedded in the "world"--in things, both in ourselves and around us, which are capable of being felt, tasted, lived; the "world" is diversity, as well as the passional movements that respond to it, whether in the flesh, in sentiment, or in thought.

The "one thing needful" is the transferring of our roots into what appears to be nothingness, emptiness, unity. Since the soul cannot plant its roots in the void, the void is "incarnated" in the symbol; it is in everything that brings us nearer to God.

Frithjof Schuon
Prayer Fashions Man

This quote sums up the Dormition for me. I haven't quite got a handle on how it seems so perfect to me for this Feast. It seems to mesh well with the scripture readings for the day: it has the same sort of movement. From the diversity of the world, to the humble void of the receptive, virginal soul, and back out, through that unity, to the diversifying fecundity of the symbolic imagination. See, I don't really know what I am talking about, but I am trying to get a handle on it.

Clever Stuff!

Go to Bent Objects Blog to see some of the racier stuff. Or don't.

Approaching The End of the Church Year: Part 1

Around the time of the secular New Year, we all get to thinking about the meaning of our lives. Even if we try not to dance to the tune of non-religious holidays, it is hard to resist making and breaking a few resolutions. Given that we do as much for Dick Clark, it seems something of a duty to give some thought to the meaning of our church lives in anticipation of the upcoming beginning of the new church year.

It seems odd, doesn't it, to say the "new church year". As if we Orthodox would allow anything substantial to change from one year to the next. And yet, there is no denying that every new church year is different from the last. As babies are born and friends are lost to death or distance, the presence of change in the midst of familiarity makes itself known. It seems we are pushing ever-forward into uncharted waters at the same time as we are returning home.

Another way to say this is to note that we are in the peculiar position of remembering that which has yet to occur. As a church we have supped with the resurrected Christ, indeed even been invited to touch his resurrected wounds. We cannot deny that, in Christ, we have all been raised. But how many of us have actually stretched out our arms to touch that new flesh, and become resurrected as a unique member in the body of Christ? As a church we are comfortable with remembering the resurrection. As individuals we tend to look forward to it.

Of course, this tension between the outlook of the individual and that of the universal must ultimately be resolved in favor of the one true outlook of the Universal: the One, the Father. But this is much easier to say than to live. I have a feeling that we all laugh a little too easily at Thomas: that apostle apart who wouldn't believe the testimony of all the rest until he had seen the resurrected body with his own eyes. We tend to forget that Thomas, though last to see Christ, was the first to call him his God. (to be continued, I hope)

Whether: 'tis Nobler!

It's through joy that weather rhymes with whether;
Joy the weather man, foreknowing, forgoes.
For the sake of a pleasant morning commute,
He steals the thunder from the wonder of the show.

Weather it will, or weather it won't: it's better left unmeasured.
As C.S. Lewis liked to say, a surprise is the best type of pleasure.

When We Think We Are Weak

With the will man must resist evil and accomplish the good; to know is to will, and to will is to realize. To rely on the help of Heaven without abstaining from evil and without striving towards the good is hypocrisy; to be sincere is to will, and to will is to be able. But here man might object that he cannot do all he will; we reply that he can always strive, and if he cannot do everything, he can at least do something.

It is here that prayer intervenes; if a man feels himself weak and imperfect, he has a right and even a duty to ask Heaven for help. He has this right to the degree he is sincere, and he has this duty to the degree he is weak. And he alone is weak who is unaware that underlying weakness there is strength, and that every quality belongs to God.

Frithjof Schuon
Prayer Fashions Man

When We Think We Are Strong

If we were able, such as we are, to be absolutely spiritual-an obviously contradictory supposition-we would be identical with the divine Principle, and we would not have to be delivered from anything. To be more precise, we may add that the man who through ignorance or theoretical preconceptions neglects to integrate the psychic elements of his personality into his spiritual attitude possesses these elements nonetheless, whether he allows them to wander about at will, side by side with theoretical conceptions and in contradiction to them, or represses them, so that they slumber in his subconscious as more or less latent obstacles. In any spiritual realization it is important that a man not be fixed, so to speak, within one restricted area of his ego; on the contrary, all his possibilities must be awakened, recapitulated, and channeled in accordance with their respective natures, for man is all that constitutes him; his faculties are interrelated. It is not possible to open the intelligence to the Divine without ennobling the psychic and even physical being; there is no spirituality without greatness and without beauty.

Frithjof Schuon
Prayer and Integration of the Psychic Elements

File Under: Things I Know Now (Click on it to see it big)

Fasting Reflection #1

If a meal requires no recovery time, have we actually eaten?

An Equation: Roman Holiday - Gregory Peck + Clark Gable = A Better Movie

Hear me out. Roman Holiday is a beautiful movie; so beautiful that, over the course of one wonderful viewing, I developed a raging crush on Audrey Hepburn, though I don't care for her in any other movie.

The one big problem with the movie is Gregory Peck. He plays a charming, manipulative reporter. Mr. Peck is charming like Atticus Finch is charming. He has those big, earnest eyes and that "aw shucks" grin. He is stiff as a board, and nearly as boring. It just doesn't work when he tries to do a mischievous smile. He's a good actor, so he doesn't ruin the movie. But it could have been so much better!

How? Two words: Clark Gable! I think Clark was too old by the time RH was filmed. Maybe he was dead. I don't know. The point is, in his prime, he was perfect for that role. How do I know? Because he won an Academy award for nearly the exact same role in It Happened One Night. Everything he would have had to do in RH he did in IHON.

1) Be a handsome reporter. Check!
2) Lie to a beautiful street-stupid woman. Double Check!
3) Charm the pants off of her. Triple Check!
4) Fall in love with her, though she is way out of his league. Quadruple Check!
5) Look forlorn. Five Check!
6) Do the right thing in the end. Six Check!

If you have never seen It Happened One Night then you owe it to me, and to the memory of Clark Gable, to queue it up on the ol' Netflix.

Psalmic Struggles

The Psalms have always been hard for me to pray. I have prayed the 51st on and off for a few years and it is the one I know best. This is not to say it is my favorite. I find the ones that contain a lot of natural imagery about God's glory to be my favorites. "Night speaks to night..." or something like that. Psalms like the 51st, that focus on repentance, are less immediately stirring to me. Hard-heartedness I suppose! I do not doubt, at least when I am being clear-headed, that my transgressions have been blotted out, but it usually takes some mental gymnastics to feel this feelingly. I get the feeling that it is more helpful, more prayerful, to just confess my boredom with the 51st and move onto something that requires less of a puppet show. And yet, I can't ever seem to dispense with it(Pharisee anyone?).

I read somewhere that when Christ enters the soul, or enters the world, natural imagery seems empty and beside the point. There is really something to this. Christ is the Word, the link between the objects in nature and their ultimate meaning in God. When that Word becomes flesh how could he not show the inadequacy of all of these symbols at expressing the true meaning behind creation? And yet, temperamentally, I like thinking in symbols and finding apt metaphors for things. I have a feeling that my love of the Psalms involving God's glory as seen in nature is at root a desire to find a prayerful place for my love of symbols. I wonder though if I might not benefit from struggling to make my appreciation of the repentance Psalms a little more heartfelt. But, of course, that is not the point. Repentance, not literary appreciation, is the point. I would like (wouldn't we all) to more honestly pray to the image shattering One behind all the images. How to remove the obstacles to this? I guess I could pray about it.

A Curious Correspondence in Mark?

Just before St. Peter confesses Christ to be the Son of God, Christ partially heals, and then fully heals, a blind man. Partially healed, the blind man sees men as if they were walking trees. Could this imperfect sight be meant to correspond to the ambiguous glimpse of Christ that Peter recieves shortly after this incident?

Christ's approval of St. Peter's confession proves that St. Peter's glimpse into Christ's nature was a true seeing. Christ's subsequent rebuke proves that this true seeing was not without its limitations. It is the same with the blind man: he truly saw men, where before he saw nothing, but he saw them in a distorted way. Specifically, he saw them as walking trees. Can we squeeze something profound out of this strange detail?

How might a tree describe a man? As a walking tree, perhaps? This makes sense if we remember that trees are alive in a more contingent way than men are. They need the soil they are rooted in if they are to move (i.e. grow) at all. If a tree recieved a momentary glimpse of the nature of man, the most startling thing to him might be man's ability to pick up his life and carry it somewhere else.
"What did you see?" asks the fig tree.
"I saw a walking tree.", says the oak.
"Well I never!", says the fig. "Hey guys! Get this! Oak here says he saw a walking tree!"
"A walking tree? Have you ever heard of such a thing?", the birch asks the maple.
"Who me?", answers the maple, "The only walking tree I ever saw was a dead tree. You can't live without roots! Imagine, living without roots!"
At this point the oak might begin to waver.
"Well, maybe the wind was just blowing really hard. Maybe he wasn't walking after all."

How hard it would be, as a tree, to realize that your roots were not the source of your strength and life; that you could be uprooted and die and yet live to walk. How hard it would be, as a Jew, to realize that Jerusalem, which is likened to a fig tree later in Mark, must be whithered-that your temple must be destroyed, that your people must be uprooted and scattered around the earth. How could this not be looked at, by such a man as St. Peter, as an impossibilty? Of course Peter wavered when he saw the dream of conquest die: how could the Messiah fail?

We all look at Christ as a walking tree: as something that somehow carries its life within itself wherever it goes. But this glimpse of God is easy to lose sight of day-to-day. We are tempted to say: "this is the part of my soul ,of my individuality, of my daily activities, where Christ takes root. This is Jerusalem!" It is a severe mercy that Christ whithers himself for our sake, and withdraws from our sight, that we might not worship idols.

Darden Continued!!!

Part II-Darden Begins Warrior Training

Darden’s dreams about being a warrior involved butting things with his horns, kicking other goats and running fast and far. You can imagine his disappointment when his first day in warrior school was taken up with, of all things, prayer. Goats, again very much like the Chinese, don’t see much of a difference between moving gracefully and praying. For lack of a better idea, you might think of a goat’s style of prayer as a kind of Tai Chi. When goats bend down on their front knees to eat grass, (I hope you have had the chance to see this!), they look at this act firstly as prayer and only secondly as a way of getting earthly nourishment. This might give you some idea of the mentality that gave birth to the highly ritualized movements that Darden was having to learn from his teacher Sensei Rolf. Every kick, head butt and punch had a meaning, and had to be done in a certain style. Unfortunately for Darden, Sensei Rolf was very strict. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say that Darden had to learn the Falling Leaf style of goat martial arts, and he was not doing very well. Consequently Sensei Rolf was always asking him to go meditate in the corner of the field until he had “found his center”. After a few weeks Darden grew quite fond of this kind of prayer. But, for most of his first day he just kind of wondered what a center was and tried not to get caught nibbling the daisies.

When class wasn’t in session, there was a tremendous amount of homework to be done. Now, goats obviously don’t know how to read or write so you might wonder what goat homework is like. Well, at that time the goats in Crenshaw forest still knew how to talk, so their homework was to memorize stories that had been handed down from goat to goat since the time of Noah. As you may have been able to guess, it was Popsy’s job to tell his son the stories. You might be wondering how Popsy was able to do this and still work a nine to five job. That’s the best part: goats don’t have jobs! What about Sensei Rolf you might ask: doesn’t he have a job, the job of teacher? Yes and no. You see, for something to be a job, the person doing it has to be doing it for some reason besides love. Now, the prophets may have loved grumbling about not getting enough of a grass offering , but don’t think for a minute they would have stopped teaching even if no one gave them a single blade. They loved to teach, and the best of them knew they loved it. So, I guess you could say Popsy’s job was to remember stories and tell them to Darden.

Darden’s favorite story of all was the story of The Golden Princess. You’ll forgive me later for telling you this story now. It will give you a good idea of what Darden was like if you know that this was the story he loved most. You’ll have to forgive the translation. Goats sing more than they speak, so their language draws some meaning from melody and rhythm that I won’t be able to capture.

The Golden Princess
In the time before hooves, in the time before grass, in the time before horns, there was a princess with golden fur who got lost in Crenshaw forest. She spent her days crying and her nights shaking. Her dress became tattered, her fur became tangled, and her great beauty faded away.

[I am going to have to break in here and explain something. Goats do not actually know what a princess looks like. They know what a woman looks like, but they wouldn’t dare think that a princess would look anything like a modern human woman (no offense ladies). It is only by imagining a kind of goat without hoofs, horns or hunger that goats can express the kind of super-human beauty and strength that a princess seems to them to possess. Please do not be disconcerted if every now and again I have to say that the princess had fur or that she loved to whinny. There is a mixing of the human and the goatish here that cannot honestly be ignored]

The princess loved to whinny. Every night she whinnied to the moon, she winnied to the trees, she whinnied to the wind. One night she whinnied so loud that she woke the lake dragon. He had been sleeping on his treasure for many years, and he was very hungry. He flew from his cave by the lake in a terrible huff. The princess saw the dragon’s shadow against the moon, and hid behind a rock. She crept through the shadows for many miles until she came to the entrance of the dragon’s cave.

She looked in and saw the treasure. Her heart told her to gallop away, but she wanted to see the beautiful jewelry. As she trotted slowly into the cave her eyes fell on a magic mirror. She looked at her reflection in the glowing silver light. For a moment all the years of crying and wandering were washed away. She looked like the beautiful princess of her early days. The vision faded and she became even sadder than before. She decided she would rather be eaten by the dragon than be so ugly. She laid down and waited to die.

The dragon came back to his cave at daybreak, more hungry than ever. He saw the princess lying there, and was about to eat her whole, when she woke up. She looked at him, closed her eyes, hung her head, and waited patiently to be eaten. When the dragon saw this, his dragon heart burst, and one large tear fell down his scaly face. He died from love for the princess. The princess, seeing this, fell on her face crying. She still wanted to die, but she knew it was wrong to want such a thing. She laid for many days in the cave, not knowing what to do with herself.

When the dragon died the mirror’s spirit had nowhere to go. The spirit left the mirror and floated out over the lake. The wind died in the middle and the spirit of the mirror settled on the water. At night, the princess saw the moon reflected in the lake and wondered what it was. She walked out of the cave and looked down at her reflection in the water. She saw her young self looking back at her. Crying a terrible cry, she dove into the water. She swam furiously to the other shore. When she emerged onto the shore on the other side, she began to run all night, and did not stop until she was dry. She felt young again. And, in fact, she was.

She ran till day, till day, all the way back to her father’s castle.

[The last line is sung in a mournful key.]

You Can't Escape Being A Teacher!!!

We are told to take the Eucharist with others, as a body. We sing together, we pray together, we line up together. Still, one must eat with the mouth given them, think with their own mind, and love with their own soul. It is true, we aspire to think and love as a body. In fact we are told to "love one another that with one mind we may confess..." But this should not blind us to the struggle implicit in this. It is easy to sing love songs, not so easy to love and be loved.

It should worry us that we don't have any heated disputes about the interpretation of scripture. Not that we should get political about it and start hurling anathemas. Let's face it: the time of great warring schools of thought is past. We are all heretics because we are all individualists. Lets each of us start where we are by looking at scripture through the lens of our own particular soul, with all its questions and distortions. We might be surprised how little we actually agree. Then we might be able to more fruitfully approach the unanimity of the fathers or the wordless teachings of the icons.

Could you imagine someone asking you, "how did it taste?", as you turned from the chalice? No, this would be unthinkable. Does this not prove how very personal and intimate is a man's relationship with the Truth? Despite all that we Orthodox share and proclaim together we still have to acknowledge this intimacy. It is one thing, a very passive thing, to believe that the fullness of truth can be found through living with the scriptures, teachings and rites of the church. It is another, higher endeavor to think correctly and honestly about these things. It is still a higher thing to actually taste the truth and know that we are tasting it: to no longer just believe, but to actually know the fullness of truth. Given all of that: how could it not be nearly the highest thing imaginable, the most excruciating, painstaking, yet joyously spontaneous fountain of expression, to turn to your fellow Christian and share, knowingly, what the fullness of truth tastes like to you personally? One might as well try to paint a walking, talking portrait of a man. And yet some of us are perhaps not excused from this task. Somehow, we must keep this as our goal. Though we may spend our whole life merely cleaning our brushes and correcting our sketch, we must nevertheless nurture a hope that God is painting along with us.

But what of those who do not feel this impulse to turn and teach? Good for them, if they are truly this way. My concern is with those of us who might want to be teaching or learning more, but make excuses.