Hilbert's Thoughts

Return from the East

2012-01-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

i just returned this Monday from a three-week visit to my in-laws in China. My mother-in-law has been having health problems, and we went to try to cheer her up and help out around the house. i love my wife's parents and her brother (who visits at least once a week, despite his busy job and the awful Beijing traffic) and enjoy spending time with them. Sometimes, though, this means spending a little time on my own, when they go out to see the doctor. i've usually not been very good at handling alone time, but it helped this time to bring whatever work material i could safely bring abroad and spend a lot of time reviewing source code and papers. To me, the silence of the gods is deafening, and so i've never been very good at using idle time to develop the spirit.

It did help, though, to take some time to cultivate consciousness of the Higher Self. This is about all the religious discipline i can manage these days without feeling ridiculous or ashamed. My impression is that the Higher Self has a Name which can be used devotionally. This use helps reminds myself that the end goal is returning to the Source and that the access mechanism is through the Higher Self, which functions as an interface. (i realize i'm using computer science terminology; i suspect Pythagoreans would prefer it (or even category theory) to geometry as a source of metaphysical vocabulary, if they came about today.) Daily life then aims towards that goal of returning to the One. (Honestly, i tire of my individual personality and am really hoping that i get to give it up at the end of my days.) i'm not sure whether this is accurate, but taking this approach during my trip seemed to help me gain perspective on being alone in a place that can sometimes feel alien (not at all due to my spouse's lovely family, though!).

Where have I been?

2011-11-21T21:50:00.001-08:00

Mainly running around like a headless chicken, consumed by work and travel.

Friends of ours who raise chickens told us about their pair of ornamentals who have feathers partially covering their eyes. If the pair is placed back-to-back, they will run about frantically until they collide with each other, and are thereby reassured that the other still exists. I've known some smart birds, but alas, over all the centuries we've bred all the brains out of those poor (but tasty) creatures.

All of this work means i've had very little energy for anything else. I'm not going to succumb to guilt about that, but if i've neglected answering e-mails, i do feel bad about that. Please feel free to poke me again if need be, with awareness of the coming holiday travel season.

Blessings to you all for a happy Thanksgiving!

Novena to Holy Wisdom, Day 9

2011-09-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu VIII

Prayer: i can't even finish a novena properly on time, but i hope that the Subject takes pity on the Object despite the intermediary's failings...

A Novena to Holy Wisdom, Day 8

2011-09-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu VI

Thoughts: Why is it that so late one finally encounters the Other? Without the horizontal Other, the vertical would have been only the self-image. Hand in hand, walking toward the darkness together, you will see one day that everything in me not of the gods will have been stripped away.

A Novena to Holy Wisdom, Day 7

2011-09-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu XIV

Reading: John 1:29-33

Prayer: May blessings descend like dew upon you, you who taught me the art of transmutation. i pray this in the Name of the Prime Transmuter, the First and Last Priest, Amen.

A Novena to Holy Wisdom, Day 6

2011-09-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu XXI

Readings: The Apocalypse of John, 21:1-7. "... the new Jerusalem, coming down from God like a bride adorned for her husband."

.. magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.

-- Virgil, Eclogues 4

Prayer: You have said, "Behold, I make all things new." May Your will be done now to the Microcosm as it will be done to the Macrocosm. Let Your Presence settle upon your Image, restore her glory, and make her one with her Higher Nature. This i ask in the Name of the One who stands to receive the souls of the faithful, Amen.

Intercede for us, Queen of the heavenly hosts!

A Novena to Holy Wisdom: Day 5

2011-09-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu XVII

Reading: Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht 3. Also recommended: Charles Williams' "The Death of Palomides," in Taliessin Through Logres.

Prayer: "Netzach is the name of the Victory in the Blessing: / For the Lord created all things by means of his Blessing." As you have blessed me once before, come forth and bless me yet again. Yet i will always sing to your praises.

A Novena to Holy Wisdom: Day 4

2011-09-15T22:33:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu X

Reading: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.

Prayer: Recordare Virgo Mater Dei.

Notes: Waite cites the permutation "Rota Taro Orat Tora Ator." i have a hard time believing that. All i see when i gaze on this card is dukkha. Similarly, i have a hard time imagining today's god, a god of thunder, a male god with bare arm and lightning spear, as "merciful." On such a day i see only the weeping Mother. (Today is her day, the Day of her Seven Sorrows.) She alone does not grovel, because she has no need. The rest of us grovel before Fortune, before Time, before the manly bare-armed god. Her God is no god at all, or only an upside-down god.

A Novena to Holy Wisdom: Day 3

2011-09-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu IX

Reading: Rúnatal Óðins (Hávamál 138-145)

Reflection: The Traveler's look conceals the journey's length.

Prayer: O Hertýr, Rune-Smith, take our fear of that dreadful suspension. Instruct us in the courage of the whet-stone, that Wisdom known only through sacrifice. If we must war against ourselves, then let us take up arms with you at our head, the heavenly host among us. When you ask, "Do you know how to sacrifice?", let our answer always be Yes. This i ask in the Name of the Consummation of the Pattern. Amen.

Notes: i can't help but associate the Hermit with Odin the Wanderer. The title "Hertýr" means Elohim Tzabaoth; other Names of Odin might be illuminating. i prefer the association of the Hermit with Virgo, rather than Scorpio.

A Novena to Holy Wisdom: Day 2

2011-09-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

Meditation: Atu XII

Reading: T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," lines 37-41

Reflection: Helplessness

Prayer: The last few lines of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday":

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto thee.

A Novena to Holy Wisdom: Day 1

2011-09-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

Timing: Coincidence times the start of this Novena with the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival and therefore the full moon. The traditional associations make this appropriate. While one should need no reason to seek Wisdom, i have a particular cause for this invocation.

Preparation: A walking Rosary, preferably outdoors, in sight of the full Moon.

Meditation: Atu II.

Reading: Proverbs 2:13-20.

Prayer: O Holy Wisdom, long have i sought You, in things material and spiritual. You are indeed a Tree of Life to those who grasp You. Look now with mercy upon your projection on earth, the one who first taught me the path of the Open Hand and the Inner Book, from whose face i first learned to turn my gaze upwards. Show your daughter the means to cross the inner desert. Bearer of the Secret Name, bless her with open hand. This i ask in the Name of the Eternal End, Amen.

"The secrets of evolution are time and death."

2011-08-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

The title of this post quotes Carl Sagan in "Cosmos," as it occurs in a lovely autotune remix. Hearing this quote, I realize that for me it contains an additional layer of meaning beyond what Dr. Sagan intended: spiritual evolution, as well as physical evolution. This reflection brings conflicted feelings. Time and death are great enemies, but time introduced mutations and environmental changes into life, and death refined its ability to survive and manipulate its environment. Time and death made our ancestors crawl out of the ocean, stand on two feet, and pick up tools; they made us contemplate our ends and our end. I've often wanted nothing more than to "smash the clock," to destroy that awful Moloch ticking away deadlines; yet with time I matured, and the thought of death makes me value every moment. So yes, the secrets of evolution are indeed time and death.

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, "Toward the Future," 1936, XI, 86-87

Freyja to the Metrotheos via Guanyin

2011-07-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

A status post by a blogger friend alluded to the mythological origins of Friday -- "Freyja's day" -- which by the interpretatio romana is consecrated to Venus. Thinking of this, i caught a glimpse of the Guanyin pendant i wear all the time. i must admit not being particularly attracted to Venus, but the sight of "She who perceives the world's lamentations" reminded me not to limit the Roman god-form to vulgar fertility. (There's no more vulgar portrayal of Venus to me than the end of C. S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength," where CSL kills off science and then truncates the goddess' influence to a falsely-chaste dismissal of birth control.) "Netzach," cry the pair of Spanish Kabbalists in Charles Williams' "The Death of Palomides," which maps to Venus in a supremely nonsexual way, a way gloriously barren.

Gazing at Guanyin reminded me of the transition from Friday to Saturday. Guanyin bridges two mythologies: Friday's fertility cult (Guanyin is sometimes portrayed holding a baby, suggesting she could grant children to the barren), and Saturday's worship of a higher order -- Saturday, the day of the Theotokos and Metrotheos. Guanyin mythologically "interpolates" between Freyja and the Metrotheos, just as (s)he interpolates between genders ("Is Guanyin a man or a woman?" "Yes.") and more importantly, between divine Emptiness and the needs of physically-bound entities.

Bibliomancy as divination

2011-06-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently described using a common technique for reading the Holy Scriptures: opening the book to a random page and reading whatever catches the eye first. I've heard this called "fleecing the Bible." As authority for this practice we have no less a figure than St. Augustine, who understood the angelic command "Tolle, lege!" ("Take, and read!") in this way (Book VIII, Confessions). He even reports that at the time, his recollection of Abba Antonius "fleecing the Bible" led to his interpretation of the command.

All of this is perfectly traditional and orthodox. What struck me, though, about my friend's report, is that she called the practice "bibliomancy," using the same Greek suffix as other divination practices: geomancy, cartomancy, etc. This made me realize the common thread: seeking Divine inspiration by using chance to quiet the rational mind temporarily, allowing new conclusions to come forth.

Bibliomancy helped St. Augustine reach a decision he knew he needed to make, but did not want to. I've seen the practice abused as well, as a way of avoiding a necessary rational decision. If "original sin" darkens the will utterly, then we could never decide what to eat for breakfast without sinning! In any case, the point is that "bibliomancy" is really just another "-mancy": the only difference is the symbol set from which one picks.

"The Queen's Servant"

2011-05-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

On request, I'm posting a poem of Charles Williams, from his second Arthurian collection "The Region of the Summer Stars." The poem is called "The Queen's Servant." I am posting this poem without permission, but the relevant books are out of print, and used editions come only expensively. Any typographical errors are mine alone; I found none in the edition I'm using ("Taliessin through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, and Arthurian Torso," (CW and C. S. Lewis, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1974).

The lord Kay wrote to the lord Taliessin:
'Now the queen's majesty has need of a maid
for certain works -- to read Greek and translate,
to manage the building of rose-gardens, to wait
about her in actions of office; one who knows
the rhythms of ceremony, also of the grand art.
The house of Your Sublimity, besides its name in battle,
sends forth a fame of such knowledgeable creatures; please
the king's poet to sign this warrant I send,
adding what name he choose to bear it back.'

Taliessin sent for one of his proved household,
proper to the summons, near his thought. She came;
he exhibited the warrant, saying: 'Now be free.
The royalties of Logres are not slavishly served,
nor have you deserved these years less of Us
than to go to the queen's meinie.' She said: 'So.
Freedom, I see, is the final task of servitude.
Yet buy, sir, still what was bought in your thought --
myself with a clear sum purchased from the world.
Though I pay the ransom now, it is but with your gold;
hold well now to the purpose of the purchase.
How shall I serve else?' He said: 'The spells
of Merlin were mighty in time, but rhyme trebles
the significance of time. Where once did We buy you?'
She answered: 'In a shire of Caucasia, when my lord,
growing in glory of song, passed from Byzantium
eastward through Caucasia.' He said: 'The lambs
that wander among roses of Caucasia are golden-lamped.
I have seen from its blue skies a flurry of snow
bright as a sudden irrepressible smile
drive across a golden-fleeced landscape.'
'Nay,' she said, 'though I was bought there,
have I ever seen such a place? Sir, what shire
is noted for such fair weather?' He answered: 'Read
the maps in Merlin's books or Ours or the one
small title We brought by the Emperor's leave from Byzantium.
Or even learn it a quicker way. Unclothe.
We who bought you furnish you. As was Our thought,
so be the truth, for Our thought was as the truth.
Know by Our sight the Rite that invokes Sarras
lively and lifelong. O We most unworthy!'
She cast her garments from her; shining-naked
and rose-flushed she stood; in that calm air,
fair body and fair soul one organic
whole -- so the purchase, so the purpose,
the prayer of Dindrane in the convent at Almesbury so
and the benediction (unspoken yet) of Galahad
on all the derivations. The lord Taliessin
said: 'And so, in a high eirenical shire,
are flashing flaunts of snow across azure skies,
golden fleeces, and gardens of deep roses.
There, through the rondures, eyes as quick as clear
see, small but very certain, Byzantium,
or even in a hope the beyond-sea meadows
that, as in a trope of verse, Caucasia shadows.
Uncurtain the roses.' He named a blessing from Merlin,
and she stretched her open hands to the air; there
they were full at once of roses; again and again
she gathered and flung them at Taliessin's feet --
brushing off buds that clung to her, crimson, centifoliae,
Caucasian roses gently falling in Camelot.
Art-magic spiritual, they neither faded
nor vanished; so holy, over all wizards, was Merlin.
The whole room was shaded crimson from them.
Taliessin lifted his hand; she stayed; he sang
a sweet borrowed craft from Broceliande,
and the room grew full at once of the bleat of lambs.
Visibly forming, there fell on the heaped roses
tangles and curds of golden wool; the air
was moted gold in the rose-tinctured chamber --
as in the land of the Trinity those few
who have seen say that the light is clear or roseal
or golden-cream, each in each and again in each.
Taliessin said: 'Thus the gathering through Broceliande
of the riches of Caucasia; but We -- did We not see
a poet in Italy do more for a beggar
by the grace of the Lord? neither wizard nor saint
are We; yet something perhaps -- Let the Flesh-taking
aid Us now for the making of Your Excellency's coat,
if it please the Mercy.' Thrice he genuflected,
thrice he murmured inaudible Latin, thrice
with blessed hands he touched the roses and the wool.
The roses climbed around her; shoulder to knee,
they clung and twined and changed to a crimson kirtle.
The wool rose gently on no wind,
and it was flung to her shoulders; behind her, woven of itself,
it feel in full folds to a gold-creamed cloak;
hued almost as the soft redeemed flesh
hiding the flush of the rich redeemed blood
in the land of the Trinity, where the Holy Ghost works
creation and sanctification of flesh and blood.
Taliessin fastened the cloak with his own brooch
at her throat; only he drew round her the old leathern
girdle, for a bond and a quiet oath
to gather freedom as once she gathered servitude.
Shoes he fetched her from the household's best store,
to wear still the recollection of her peers,
under whatever election she graced them still.
Clothed and brilliant, she faced the king's poet.
He said: 'So bright? yet be seen now in Camelot.'
The colour's height about her a little quenched
its power; she, still drenched by the power,
murmured: 'Let my lord end this hour with a gift
other than the Rite; that the Rite be certain, let
my lord seal me to it and it to me.'
Gravely, considering the work, the king's poet said:
'As the Roman master sets his bondman free?
or the bishop in the Roman rite the instructed neophyte
at his proper confirmation?' She said: 'To choose
were insolence too much and of too strange a kind;
my lord knows my mind.' Her eyes were set
upon him, companion to companion, peer to peer.
He sent his energy wholly into hers.
'Nay,' he said, 'henceforth, in the queen's house,
be the nothing We made you, making you something.'
Lightly he struck her face; at once the blast
of union struck her heart, the art-magic
blended fast with herself, while all she
burned before him, colour of cloak and kirtle
surpassed by colour of flesh and blood and soul
whole and organic in the divined redemption
after the kind of Christ and the order of Logres.
He said: 'Till death and after,' and she: 'Till death,
and so long as the whole creation has any being,
the derivation in certain, and the doom accomplished.'

In his room at Camelot the king's poet signed
the warrant; he gave it to the queen's free servant,
saying: 'Carry this to the lord Kay, companion.
Be as Ourself in Logres; be as Dindrane
under the Protection, and in the Protection prosper.
Depart, with God.' She said: 'Remain, in God.'

The oppression of habit

2011-03-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Slowly, slowly, i've been starting to apply all of my Tarot studies to practical readings. I've been using the Medieval Scapini deck, which interested me originally because of Ronald Decker's delightful little review of Tarot history, "Art and Arcana." Scapini's Minor Arcana differ quite a bit from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck's, which came up in particular with two cards from last night's reading: the 8 of Swords and the 8 of Wands. When i started writing this post, i caught myself conflating versions of those two cards from different decks; i'll explain this below.

For the 8 of Swords, the RWS deck depicts (according to Rachel Pollack, a student of that deck) "oppression," but not in the form of naked violence. (The fortification looms in the background, but no one holds up the swords or guards the prisoner.) It refers instead to "mystification" in the Marxist sense, where the oppressed "oppress themselves" by their own assumptions (reinforced by misinformation from above). (Why else would people on the edge of poverty staple tea bags to their hats and protest government handouts?) Scapini's 8 of Wands shows instead what seems a more pleasant scene in a vineyard (the wands cleverly woven into sakes for the vines). A couple appears in three stages of romantic development: youthful games, courting, and squabbling.

It took me a while to realize that Scapini's 8 of Wands illustrates a darker phenomenon, namely the oppression of instinct, custom, or habit. The couple in that card acts only according to biological and social expectation, not according to Will (to which Wands ultimately refer). This too is Will, but only the dark will of the blood and the unfolding of the mother's and father's example. The similarity with the RWS 8 of Swords is that the self imposes bondage: to a position in the RWS 8 of Swords, or to a scheme of human relations in Scapini's 8 of Wands.

This pair of cards speaks to two different views on moral enlightenment, which amount to the same thing. A Marxist might say that proletarians must see through the false assumptions and misinformation in order to attain the social order they desire. A traditional mystic might say instead that the patterns of the blood (biological or familial) must be discarded when they hinder the desired development of the spiritual life. Both the mystic and the Marxist speak of the triumph of True Will over lesser wills. Wands and Swords offer two complementary techniques for achieving this: "seizing the Wand" (taking the first step, overcoming lethargy, daring) and "cutting through the veil" (discernment, Scheidekunst in the good sense).

Lent is a good season to attack lethargy, habit, and misinformation. May i use it fruitfully for this purpose, and through grace attain that perfect correspondence of Divine and human Will, Amen.

Nothing!

2011-03-06T21:57:00.000-08:00

In what spare free time I can grab here and there, I've been reading Dan Simmons' Endymion and Rise of Endymion -- the last two volumes in the four-part series begun with Hyperion. I've heard these novels described as "science fiction through theophany," and they certainly have a lot to say about human evolution and the fundamental nature of reality while romping through the galaxy (and a neighboring one). I was reminded of Frater Acher's recent posts on whether magic is the search for truth, and on three approaches to reality, which in turn reminded me of Meister Eckhart's 19th sermon, about which I wrote previously.

Frater Acher rightfully criticizes the approach to magic that is just badly done physics or chemistry, that wants to define reality by dissecting it into its constituent components that can be understood and manipulated. Indeed, the old German word for chemistry was "Scheidekunst" -- the "art of separation" -- which presumes that identifying the constituent elements of a compound would reveal all its properties of interest. Novalis' scorn for this art found its vindication in modern biochemistry, where the proportions of elements in a protein mean almost nothing next to its global geometry -- the order in which the elements appear, how they bond, and how the subtle interplay of electronic interactions makes the giant molecule fold up, exposing or concealing active regions as the molecule's environment changes. Dissection is the beginning of insight, but only the beginning.

Frater Acher's post suggests that what we find after investigating the fundamental nature of reality is mere subjective experience -- in other words, "nothing." I can imagine two identical answers with different (yet complementary) meanings to the question, "What is the fundamental nature or origin of reality?" A plausible Zen Buddhist response might be "Nothing!", which would mean something like "That's an absurd question; the essence of nature is beyond categorization." The Kabbalist might answer in reference to Ayin and negative theology in general: Our efforts to carve up reality ultimately fail, because we eventually reach "something" that is NO-THING and therefore we cannot describe it. Nevertheless, Kabbalists seem to like writing about Ayin! The Hyperion series even has its "Void Which Binds," which is this sort of Nothing more in name than in substance, as grand as it is.

I can only conclude by returning to the first of Meister Eckhart's four interpretations of the quote from Acts: "...when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and that Nothing was God..." Investigations into the fundamental nature of reality only find Nothing, but Paul was not investigating; he was perceiving, not even willingly! Finding that God is Nothing can be a great revelation, even a great wonder and joy. Paul had been constructing a god of intolerance; what a joy to find that the real God is "Nothing," is the opposite of all of the constructions, indeed even swallows them up in grand Nothingness and replaces them with innocent child-like wonder. Perhaps, though, it's necessary to begin with all those constructions in order that one understands the meaning of their destruction.

"Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing"

2011-01-09T19:07:00.000-08:00

This quote from Acts (9:8) begins Meister Eckhart's 19th sermon (Vol. I, Walshe's edition). I love Meister Eckhart's sermons for the way he takes a simple story from Scripture and subverts its literal meaning to wring higher truth gloriously from it. (His sermon on Martha and Mary is highly recommended as the most subversive of the genre.) Acts 9 recounts (S/)Paul's conversion, where he was struck by lightning, fell to the ground, and hear the voice of Jesus: "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" It's a simple story because the three-day blindness is a practical consequence of the event, a moral and symbolic lesson, and also a means for Paul (through Ananias) to validate his conversion among the naturally suspicious Christian community. The translator faithfully renders the Latin (straight from the Vulgate), but it's a stripped-down translation, compared with the Douay-Rheims (an English translation of the Vulgate): "And Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he saw nothing." The striking phrase "and with open eyes saw nothing" serves Meister Eckhart's opening paragraph:

I think this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and that Nothing was God; for when he saw God he [Luke, the author of Acts] calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.

Eckhart bypasses both the literal story (flash of light causes physical blindness) and the allegorical lesson (physical blindness symbolizes Saul's moral and spiritual blindness) to draw a metaphysical conclusion that seems to have nothing to do with either! This kind of sermon, however, can only come from someone who has studied and internalized Scripture completely: now the words serve as keys to insights, rather than stories or lessons. How I wish I knew it that well!

I mention this sermon of Eckhart's because last night I was leafing through a volume of his sermons and treatises that I found in a used book store this weekend. This one stuck with me and I was thinking about it as our sub-choir set up to sing the Introit near the manger. I had to miss all the Christmas liturgies up to Epiphany due to family-related travel, so it was striking to stand next to the manger, a bit messy with straw and pine branches and neglected after the Christmas holiday, and be reminded of the great Nothingness of God made a tiny baby -- Nothing made nothing.

Meister Eckhart, Qabalah, and the Tao Te Ching complement each other nicely, incidentally ;-)

New Year's resolution?

2010-12-30T01:23:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone! Remember, it's Christmas until the Ave Regina Caelorum replaces the Alma Redemptoris Mater ;-) (that's 02 Feb, Candlemas!)
Christmas is my favorite liturgical season, but over the past few years I've often been yanked away from the liturgies by travel, family demands, and sometimes even work. That's likely to continue for a few years at least, and I'm starting to face the fact head-on and cope. The ancient Jews certainly did: synagogue life and perhaps even an entirely new theology grew out of the experience of exile in Babylon, with only the rubble of a temple awaiting them in Jerusalem. God not specific to a place becomes God everywhere, even God in oneself. Yet this doesn't satisfy in the same way that place-centered ritual does.

"I rejoiced when they said unto me, 'Let us go to the house of the LORD.' And now our feet are standing within your gates, Jerusalem" (Ps. 122:1-2). How sweet that sounds! I've often been lucky to live either next to or within a short drive of a church where liturgies were celebrated regularly. My favorite place was up in the choir loft, my favorite clothes choir robes, my favorite smell the lingering odor of incense and faint candle smoke, and my favorite way to worship singing. This was for many years, in fact, the only way I could manage to pray meaningfully.

I still have great opportunities to sing and participate in other ways liturgically, but that may not last long. Part of the way I've been preparing for that is to avoid bad experiences with prayer in the past, where my mind was alone with itself (maybe it just seemed that way) and left to wander in dark valleys. As my beliefs have evolved, I feel more comfortable about developing something of a "home liturgical life," rather than dragging along a miserable kneeling existence in exile. In that context, I appreciated Jason Miller's post on drawing deeper meaning from the Christmas story. Ritual draws its meaning from theology, and Theosis via Incarnation is a great theological basis for ritual actions in place and time.

I'm afraid of losing meaning in ritual and turning it into something escapist, and I'm also afraid of my own lack of discipline in keeping habits -- especially when those habits involve conflicts and balancing responsibilities with loved ones and other things. I'm not sure if the habit of a New Year's resolution is always good, but if I had one for the coming year, that would be it. I really want to pick myself up and keep a habit like this, that's not externally driven, and that I can feel comfortable defending if it needs defending. I'm hoping also that the practice of "defending my own" will help me defend other good things I'd like to do in the world, but haven't felt free to do for a while.

Woah, that's like the first intentionally vague, self-helpy post I've written in a dreadfully long while! Hope it's not oppressively annoying ;-) I really have nothing to complain about, compared with some blog friends I know who are really struggling materially, emotionally, _and_ spiritually. Being blessed with many choices really isn't a bad thing!

The power of the alphabet, part 2

2010-12-01T08:33:00.000-08:00

On the commute to work this morning, I was thinking about my last post, on the "power of the alphabet." Both Kabbalists and more orthodox readers of Scripture describe language as created with the universe, and the means by which the universe was created. Before the creation event, existence is called a "formless void" -- in some sense, perhaps only because no language exists by which to describe it. Names of the Divine, then, would not predate creation; we cannot address It in words in Its "original state," but only as a creating Being.

It's interesting that we as humans share in that power to create with language. This point never strikes me more than when I think about the computer scientist's task of writing an interpreter or compiler for a programming language: here, language is turned in on itself, and abstraction and expressive power increase. It's no coincidence that the bane of many an MIT undergraduate, the textbook "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," has a wizard on its cover!

The power of the alphabet

2010-11-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

A recent blog post on balancing out Geburah and Chesed led me to poke around the Tree myself. I was trying to refresh my memory on the Tzaddi correspondences, and internet search led me to Mathers' edition of the Key of Solomon. In particular, it highlighted this passage, which I take out of context from some magical formulae for cursing tardy demons (Ch. 7):

...by these names, and in virtue of these names, the which being named and invoked all creatures obey and tremble with fear and terror, these names which can turn aside lightning and thunder; and which will utterly make you to perish, destroy, and banish you. These names then are Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, He, Vau, Zayin, Cheth, Teth, Yod, Kaph, Lamed, Mem, Nun, Samekh, Ayin, Pe, Tzaddi, Qoph, Resh, Shin, Tau.

I'm not a dabbler in this sort of magic, by any means, but what struck me about this passage was not the curse, but the "names of power" -- which are nothing more or less than the letters of the (Hebrew) alphabet. Isn't it true that wielding the pen skillfully gives one more power than any weapon or army? The text goes on to say, "By these secret names, therefore, and by these signs which are full of mysteries..." It's odd to think of the letters of the alphabet as "secret names." I'm reminded of the runes ("Buchstaben") my ancestors carved into little wooden staves; runes developed from Italic or Roman letters that may have meant little to those who wrote them, and in their mystery had power to reveal fate. Perhaps Hebrew meant a little more to the author of the Key, but it was still the Divine language of Holy Writ and the language by which the universe was created. To literate folk, the alphabet itself holds no mystery, but in combination, it means all of creation and everything everywhere someone might want to express sometime. This echo of Borges' "The Library of Babel" shouldn't lead one to despair, as that work may; here, we manipulate the "names of power" to express meaning, rather than receiving all permutations of all symbols. We know we construct meaning, for good or for evil. Let it always be for good!

Liturgy of destruction and double desecration

2010-11-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know, the above title probably names two existing death metal hits ;-) Actually, the phrase "liturgy of destruction" came to me in a discussion of the title of the Book of Revelation a.k.a. the Apocalypse. A lot of this book describes a heavenly liturgy: the Redeemer in priestly vestments surrounded by lampstands, thurifer angels offering up incense, readings (from a scroll nobody but the priestly Redeemer can read) and crowds of various sentient beings worshiping and singing hymns. Even the large chunks of the work dealing with the destruction of everybody-we-don't-like have a liturgical flavor: seven seals, trumpets, and bowls mark out different torments.

A search for "liturgy of destruction" surprisingly turned up not death metal album covers, but the distinctly more serious topic of the Holocaust (itself a strikingly liturgical metaphor) and other pogroms. Google found me a page from a book: "Against the apocalypse: responses to catastrophe in modern Jewish culture," by David G. Roskies. I was struck by the following description (p. 16) of the desecration of a synagogue by a Russian army in 1917:

When my eye caught sight of the eastern wall, I was totally shaken by what I saw. The elaborate ornamentation on the ark, including the ten commandments up above, was left intact. But in the middle of the empty ark itself a huge [Eastern Orthodox] icon [of Jesus] had been placed.

Tselem baheykhal, "an idol in the sanctuary," flashed through my mind. And this shocked me more than all the pogroms I had witnessed. An ancient response began to awaken within me, an echo of the destruction of the Temple... I felt that a terrible sacrilege had been perpetrated here, a desecration of both religions. The brutal hand of a soldier run wild had exacted the same reprisal from God as from man.

The "double desecration" here stood out: the unknown vandals, violently subverting the Face of the Christ as a racial and political statement, desecrated it as much as the Jewish sanctuary. It was after reading this, that I saw the following news story about some hateful locals in Phoenix, AZ who were protesting what they thought was a mosque under construction. We laugh, because the supposed mosque was really just a dome for some Christian church, but the same double desecration stands out: Jesus' Cross, Face, and Name subverted for racial and political ends, insulting Christianity itself along with Islam. Wikipedia's article on the 1819 "Hep-Hep" riots has a fitting quote by Rahel Varnhagen: "Their hate does not stem from religious zeal: how can they hate other faiths when they don't even love their own?"

"Not a famine of bread, ... but for hearing the word of the LORD"

2010-09-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

I was struck by the following verses from today's (BCP) reading from the Book of Amos (8:11-12):

Yes, days are coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send famine upon the land: Not a famine of bread, or thirst for water, but for hearing the word of the LORD. Then shall they wander from sea to sea and rove from the north to the east in search of the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.

Amos has just been condemning the rich of Israel for defrauding the poor, which makes this passage more startling. Wouldn't the logical response to injustice be the restoration of justice -- in this case, inverting the top-heavy social order? Yet God responds in a different way. The context helps a bit: Amos has been condemning the Israelites both for their injustice, and for their religious hypocrisy:

I hate, I spurn your feasts, I take no pleasure in your solemnities; Your cereal offerings I will not accept, nor consider your stall-fed peace offerings. Away with your noisy songs! I will not listen to the melodies of your harps. But if you would offer me holocausts, then let justice surge like water, and goodness like an unfailing stream (Amos 5:21-24).

What's most disturbing about Amos' prophecy is that it has come true. Don't we see rich and poor, liberal and conservative, fundamentalist and free-thinker, all rushing about looking for spiritual reality? Don't I do the same? "Then shall they wander... in search of the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it." Hunger at least brings with it a focus and clarity of purpose: one does whatever one needs to do in order to fill one's stomach and those of one's loved ones. Generations of hunger have their own distorting effect on the moral sense, but it's hard to condemn that, any more than one can condemn the clever but sometimes cruel survival strategies found in the natural world. Having the leisure to search for the Divine, however, means that one needs to find new purpose -- a new drive to replace the old one of basic survival. This is a new stage of human evolution! I can't imagine it will be easy for us to figure this out as a species, rather than as occasional blessed individuals. I haven't figured it out yet.

An Indian Christian sigil?

2010-08-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

This Christian sigil, found in India, has been puzzling an online friend of mine. Being able to read Tamil could help, especially considering my friend's accidental discovery that the sigil has a back side with what appear to be detailed explanations of its different geometrical regions. Any ideas, fellow bloggers? Here are some discussion points:

I'm reassured that the eight-sided wheels are not the usual Buddhist "Wheels of the Law."
Jesus is in the middle of the figure -- solar, and likely not constrained by the surrounding figure -- surrounded by protective saints.

"Opere ex operato": mixing articles

2010-08-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

Jason Miller of Strategic Sorcery has been writing a series of posts on "opere ex operato" -- the magical principle that ritual properly performed "works" regardless of the belief or goodness of the operator. The phrase originates in Western Christianity, where it has been controversial for ages (read up on Donatism for an ancient example). This post on the Miraculous Medal devotion, and Mehet's comments on the following post (mildly NSFW tantric image there), stirred me to think about mixing magic from different traditions.

Mehet asked whether replacing the Blessed Virgin Mary with Holy Sophia and various deities in the Miraculous Medal devotion really blunts its efficaciousness, when similar mixing is a familiar part of magical practice. For example, the Psalms are used in root work (as Mehet points out) and Egyptian deities are mixed into the already syncretic Qabalistic tradition in Western Hermetic rituals.

i responded by saying that "things that are almost but not quite the same, tend to interfere with one another." The example i had in mind was from linguistics. Linguists suspect (see e.g., this Wikipedia article on the history of Germanic languages) that English lost its case-declined definite articles (all of which mean "the" in English, but in other Germanic languages change forms depending on the role of the following noun in the sentence) due to regular interaction between speakers of two similar Germanic languages: Danish and Anglo-Saxon. Danes colonized and took over parts of modern-day England, and along with political dominance must have come trade and social interaction. The two languages were sufficiently similar to facilitate linguistic crossing (at least to form a Pidgin). However, their case systems differed enough that people must have confused themselves to frustration. Eventually they just threw away the whole thing, and we say "the" instead of one of the many forms described here.

In this case, the Blessed Virgin and Holy Sophia each have their own imagery. They cross quite a bit, but if you're using a Miraculous Medal, you're drawing from a particularly Marian strain. (When Jason Miller speaks of "a coven of Catholic witches," i know exactly what he means. These folks are devoted thaumaturgists and very specific in their devotional imagery.) Trying to mix that up with Holy Sophia seems like it would result in confusion. (Also, i don't generally experience the two in a syncretic way, but perhaps that's a sign of my limitations!)

i understand the Psalms differently. People of so many different belief systems have used the Psalms for so long, that they aren't specifically Jewish anymore, or even Christian or Muslim or ... You could say that the Psalms are to linguistics like "Indo-European" is to English. They also have a different character than a devotion like that of the Miraculous Medal. The Paslms are prayers, evocations, meditations, etc. rather than devotions focused on a specific figure, like the Blessed Virgin.

However, after making this comment, i wondered whether the mixing of Egyptian and Christian deities in, say, the Golden Dawn tradition is rather like using the Miraculous Medal as a Holy Sophia devotion. GD folks (i'm reading Dion Fortune's "The Mystical Qabalah" at the moment) might assert that they link Egyptian, Christian, etc. deities together using a common Qabalistic (for the Outer Order at least) framework. The framework, they might say, ensures that the strains only get mixed in the intended ways. In contrast, using a Miraculous Medal for the "wrong goddess" throws away an existing framework of devotion that followers of the Blessed Virgin have been using for centuries.

i think there's something to the GD argument, but i don't have enough experience yet "mixing the articles" to know whether doing so really has power, or whether it merely dilutes the strains and turns magic into a mere "good feeling of oneness with a generally good principle."

Sorry, the Golden Ratio is not "neo-pagan"

2010-07-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite blogs for "eye candy" and occasional reading is the New Liturgical Movement (NLM). The NLM's contributors almost always do a great job at showing beauty in liturgy -- architecture, art, vestments, music, and forms -- without sullying themselves with sectarian politics. Their opinions are usually well-informed too, which is why a recent post ("Just How Golden is the Golden Section?") disappoints me all the more.

The author, David Clayton, begins with a reasonable and informed argument that the "Golden Section" (known variously by the Greek letters Φ (phi) or τ (tau)) does not play such a large role in architecture and art as common wisdom assumes. His assertion is supported by more mathematical articles cited in the comments. However, the essay's final tangent (starting in the middle of page 3) speculates that the emphasis of Φ over other ratios indicates a "neo-pagan" world view, in which "modern man focuses more on what nature is, rather than what nature ought to be." The author then continues with rambling, absurd numerological speculation: that the ancients supposedly searched for meaning in the beginning of the Fibonacci series, whereas moderns seek the "ideal" at the series' end (i.e., the limiting ratio of successive terms of the series, which a little bit of algebra shows is Φ), and that this shows that the moderns "cannot see beyond the proportions of the fallen world." (Wouldn't it mean the opposite? Φ should represent an evolutionary view which finds the ideal at the Omega Point -- the end of time which is the consummation of all things.) Clayton concludes with "A modern Christian interpretation of Φ," which makes the absurd claim that Φ represents the fallen material world and should therefore be called the "Fallen" or "Dark Section," rather than the "Golden Section."

The author's most offensive assertion in this essay -- that excessive veneration of Φ is a "neo-pagan" phenomenon -- is most offensive because it is entirely unfounded. The article cites sources on architecture, art, and mathematics, but fails to cite a single source on what neopagans or "occultists" (i.e., students of the Western hermetic tradition, whom Clayton snidely derides as unworthy of his investigation) believe about Φ. The author does observe the Pythagoreans would likely favor ratios of whole numbers, rather than irrational (in the mathematical sense) ratios like Φ. Sacred geometry and numerology in the Western hermetic tradition seems to favor the Pythagorean approach, for example using the Tetractys in correspondence with the Tree of Life. Irrational ratios do appear, but more incidentally, as part of regular geometric figures or Platonic solids. Occultists do make use of the pentagram in rituals, but this occurs entirely independently of Φ.

I'm not qualified to speak about what neopagans believe. It is a point of controversy how much the 20th-century development of organized Western neopaganism has in common with (in)famous occult figures of the time (see e.g., Wikipedia's article on Gardnerian Wicca). I would say, however, that both neopagans and occultists tend to be syncretic in their beliefs, and "take whatever they think is good from wherever they can get it." Interest in Φ by a neopagan or occultist may be no more special than their usual interest in phenomena that relate the macrocosm to the microcosm. (Clayton himself proposes Φ as an expression of this relation.) Furthermore, a central premise of the Western hermetic tradition at least is the brokenness of the created world. Human beings participate in the healing of that brokenness, a process known as the Great Work. In that sense, the ratio Φ has no more to do with "fallenness" or "darkness" than any other ratio of physical quantities.

Despite my criticism of Clayton's article, I should point out that he presents his conclusions as provisional. I would encourage him to consider not only evidence from art and architecture, but also from those beliefs which he critiques without understanding.

Theoria and praxis, distillation and inspiration

2010-07-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

We love books. While we haven't quite stooped to keeping books in our oven, our little apartment has long ago run out of shelf space. Books stack in precarious piles around the edges of the living room and reach for the ceiling on top of shelves. Many of these are spiritual and mystical books, ranging from the most orthodox of orthodox Christianity (St. Francis de Sales' "Introduction to the Devout Life") to the least orthodox (but perhaps more interesting!). I've read all of them, some several times, but i can't say that i've truly absorbed the implications of any of them. St. Maximus the Confessor said that "Theology without action (praxis) is the theology of demons." I don't think i know any more about demonic theology than i do about angelic theology, so perhaps i missed out on the content as well as the implications!

Anyhow, the point is that i look back on my ~ 15 years of devotional study, and wonder what "progress" i made. I did certainly mature from a pious but naïve youth to a more open-minded, broadly educated adult (who finally finished school not long ago, after an education of nearly epic length!). My religious perspectives certainly have changed. I can't say that i'm a kinder person, that i'm more charitable (not just in the "dropping money in the basket" way), that i'm any closer to getting in touch with the Divine -- but perhaps this is because my work and familial responsibilities demand more attention and resources. There are those books, though, mocking me.

I was thinking about that this morning when i drew two cards out of the Tarot deck: Temperance and the Star (the latter link might be a bit NSFW if your boss can't handle nonsexual art nudes). (I took the images from Wikipedia's depiction of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which i don't use, though i like Pamela Colman Smith's artwork.) Temperance and the Star both depict a female figure with two water vessels in the midst of pouring. The difference is that Temperance transfers liquid from one vessel to the other, while the Star pours them out, one upon the waters and the other upon the earth. One can understand the water here as inspiration or the "stuff" of spirituality. Pouring it between containers is an allegory of distillation or refinement (compare the alembic); pouring it out is an allegory of divine or heavenly inspiration. Distillation and inspiration aren't opposites, but they do involve different agents. The former is the work of the mystic or "spiritual alchemist" who refines received ideas, extracting out the "aqua vitae" ("water of life" -- the "living essence" of the idea). The latter comes from above. The Star's work happens in secret, at night, without an obvious human agent to receive the results. (Perhaps our mystic slept too soundly and missed a midnight date with Lady Star!)

The previous two paragraphs introduced two dualities: theoria and praxis, distillation and inspiration. I would certainly be overextending my rhetorical abilities to put them in correspondence. They do make an interesting constellation of analogies for understanding how the "stuff" of spiritual life flows around and through a person. Collected inspiration can be refined and purified through the work of Temperance or nepsis (spiritual sobriety -- the virtue keeping one on the hard, long, but ultimately rewarding path). Theory has practical implications, and practice influences and inspires theory.

The personal implication is the necessity of patience in one's spiritual growth. Inspiration comes when it wills, not when i will. Distilling it is a lifelong internal work. Careful praxis may take time to work out, so that it forms a partnership with theoria, rather than fighting against it. (Just because some group is oppressed, doesn't mean one should immediately rush the barricades with them!) Perhaps this is only self-justification, but it also seems wise to be patient with one's one nature. If it takes me a long time to gather and to distill, to refine myself and my ideas, then as long as i'm following the path of true spiritual sobriety, i should let things develop naturally.

Distillation and sublimation

2010-05-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

i'd better start up this blog again before the spammers take over!

Was poking around the bookstore for Dion Fortune's "The Mystical Qabalah," which i never had the chance to finish, but found her "The Training and Work of an Initiate" instead. Surprising to see the book as "The Mystical Qabalah" bought from such a conventional bookstore. Sometimes i look down on the simple folk in this town, but there must be an interesting reader among them!

Dion Fortune makes a useful point in the latter book: for someone on the path of hidden work in the world (the "occult path"), all the "things of this world" that distract from the Work are not for renunciation, but for sublimation. The technical image there is of carbon dioxide ice passing directly from the solid to the gaseous state, but the esoteric image is that of "gross matter" being "spiritualized": the sculptor carving beauty out of stone, the poet shaping everlasting words out of changeable feelings. Related images are the crucible and the still: two different ways to express the same idea of separating a noble material from its impurities.

This reminded me of a conversation i had with an experimental chemist. His experiments require exceptionally pure ethyl alcohol. Even the alcohol he purchases from chemical supply houses isn't pure enough, so he has to refine it further by distillation, in a process not much different from what moonshiners use. i asked him whether he couldn't just start with the same raw material (fermented mash) used to distill strong liquors for human consumption, but he said that he can't, because that raw material has water in it. It's physically (i.e., thermodynamically -- barring the work of Maxwell's Demon) impossible to use heat to separate a mixture of water and alcohol completely. Some 5% of the water will always remain. The raw substance with which he starts, therefore, contains no water; it must be made using a different process than used for distilling liquor.

This conversation suggests an esoteric analogy, which should give pause to those who want to practice sublimation: Is it possible to sublimate all human emotions and experiences? Can everything be spiritualized? i don't speak of things that are definitely wicked -- that clearly harm others or oneself. Some things may not be wicked, but they may not be good material for spiritualization: we may need to drop them completely, to renounce them, rather than try to carve them into the desired shape or burn them into a more pure substance. All things are good, we are told; but are they?

The pen is mightier than the sword?

2009-11-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

According to Wikipedia, the word "athame" (referring to a knife used in ritual magic) is a corruption of "artavus," a quill knife ("a small knife used for sharpening the pens of scribes" -- "cultellus acuendis calamis scriptorii," as found in early editions of the Key of Solomon). Of course the use of such knives in ritual magic has changed over the years and has been subject to fanciful interpretation and outright invention. However, the subtle meaning (as I see it) is that the pen is equivalent to the knife or sword: a tool that cuts between good and evil. Truly writing is a "Scheidekunst," though I see that word not as Novalis sees it (as a perverse artificial separation of philosophia into separate scientific fields that do not inform one another), but as "the art of decision." Surgeons wield the scalpel to access diseased tissue and remove it; critics wield the pen to reveal disorders of thought and excise them.

Vermouth straight: "Trouble in Tahiti"

2009-07-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

Over breakfast this morning, I caught a scene from a movie adaptation of Leonard Bernstein's opera "Trouble in Tahiti": after walking out of a particularly cheesy movie, Dinah works her way through the liquor cabinet in a fit of 1950s confined-housewife-with-selfish-husband misery, singing the whole while. The staging in a suburban home of the time was full of artifacts and colors of the time (I'm always struck by how enthusiastically 1950s families covered their counters with the latest in kitchen technology). Amidst all the richness, though, a tiny point stood out: after Dinah had already drunkenly poured herself a few, the last pour was from a bottle of Vermouth. That was such a subtle point in the staging, but it meant so much: the only reason for a 1950s American household to keep a bottle of Vermouth around is for martinis, and if she is drinking Vermouth straight, it means she has already exhausted the gin supply and is desperate to continue her drinking binge. Even though it's a sad, ironic moment, one still appreciates the aesthetic sense, the historical awareness, and the thought that went into the staging.

Consensus: chant and community

2009-06-28T21:17:00.001-07:00

This Sunday morning, our schola was joined by a professional singer with expertise in early music -- Gregorian chant, pre-Bach polyphony, and the like. Different scholae sing chant very differently, and I could tell during rehearsal that she was feeling her way around, trying to figure out how our director and our schola interpret various musical directions. This led to an interesting discussion between our director and her about how a schola decides on a musical interpretation of chant -- of a particular piece and of a whole style of chant (Gregorian, Mozarabic, Ambrosian, etc.). It was fun to listen in and talk about the way I learned to sing chant.

During the warmups before Mass, I was assuming the professional singer would remark on the interpretation method. When she asked a question about interpretation, I remarked that we do "parish Solesmes" (referring to the French monks who revived Gregorian chant in the West in the 19th century), meaning that we interpret vaguely according to Solesmes rules, bending them either to make the music easier for amateurs or to make it more musical. In the discussion after Mass, though, it came out that she was thinking of something entirely different than a set of rules. The word she used was "consensus": guided by the text, the melodic line, and by historical investigation, the schola members gradually come to agree together on the subtleties of interpretation. She contrasted this with a director imposing rules upon a choir that must learn them. Consensus is most often not a conscious verbal act; it emerges as a group phenomenon from individuals, who both have unique characters and seek unity and agreement.

Consensus involves an interesting balance between individual leadership and submission to the group. Individuals have to have an opinion, and lead -- otherwise the director just ends up imposing a rule, and dragging everyone else along, like a string of five-year-olds on a class outing. However, people have to compromise on strict interpretations if they realize that the choir just isn't going along. Everyone has horror stories of that one stubborn person whose rigidity precipitated open conflict.

What I like especially about consensus is that it makes each group unique. It evolves out of practice -- out of common practice, together -- and thus it shows progress towards forming a real community. Of course it makes trouble for singers who have to learn all those subtle, unwritten cues when they have to work outside their normal group, but to me that lends so much character to the art of sacred music.

Knowing he is God, he stripped down and washed their feet

2009-04-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight is Maundy Thursday -- Maundy coming from "Mandatum," for Jesus commands tonight in the Gospel reading:

Si ergo ego lavi pedes vestros, Dominus et Magister: et vos debetis alter alterius lavare pedes. Exemplum enim dedi vobis, ut, quemadmodum ego feci vobis, ita et voc faciatis (John 13).

"If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, then you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also." What struck me from tonight's Gospel reading, though, was not so much the familiar command, but John's introduction:

Before the festival day of the Pasch, Jesus, knowing that his hour was come, that he should pass out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them unto the end. And when supper was done (the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray him), knowing that the Father had given him all things into his hands and that he came from God and was going to God: he rose from supper and laid aside his garments and, having taken a towel, girded himself.

I have to quote the whole introduction to the chapter to get the grand effect. John reiterates Jesus' unbearable foreknowledge, his sense of purpose and intense love and fully willful, unconstrained and unforced self-sacrifice, and then -- Jesus strips down and puts on a towel. It's a strange letdown: the language sets you up for a grand, heroic gesture -- perhaps a second, more impressive ritual to follow the first Eucharist, or a revelation of a great new teaching -- and then Jesus does something completely humiliating and weird, something that not even a slave would be asked to do.

In some sense, this act encapsulates the Incarnation: it's a completely weird thing that such a grand and infinite God could want to be so close to Creation as to become part of it. Earlier today I saw an article discussing the symbolism of the four-petal jasmine flower that appears on the image of the Lady of Guadalupe. For the Aztecs of the time, the flower represented the four directions of the universe -- and thus, universal authority, along the same pattern as the circle-cross or spherical scepter topped with a cross. It symbolized Ometeotl, the Twofold God, "Owner of the Near and Far," "Lord of heaven and earth," "Creator of people," "Inventor of Himself" -- an abstract god without a cult of worship or a temple, a god too grand, high, and remote to have an interest in human affairs. And yet -- the Fourfold Flower appears engraven on the womb of the Mother of God. The Lady comes bearing God, the same God that was or that seemed completely inaccessible, yet here appears tiny and weak and helpless, wrapped in swaddling clothes or a towel or a burial cloth.

Covering the statues

2009-03-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

Today is Passion Sunday in the traditional Latin Rite, and I noticed that our parish follows the venerable tradition of covering the representations of the Crucifix, of Jesus and of other holy figures with a purple cloth, from today until the Easter Vigil. It seems contradictory at first to conceal the signs of the Passion during the very time in which we commemorate it, not only in the liturgy but also in devotional practices, such as watching Passion plays and films, or praying the Stations of the Cross. Of course, it makes sense to remind ourselves that Jesus was "taken from us," that human power and fear occulted God. Jesus himself experienced that occultation; as a churchgoer described to me today, bearing the full burden of sin on his human body brought about such a deep contradiction between the divine and human natures that it could only mean death for the One bearing it. In covering the statues, we remind ourselves that the "real" Passion was as much about the inner experience of abandonment and spiritual deprivation, as it was about physical suffering and death.

Every year, Lent is a great burden to me. Perhaps this is because I wore myself out from many years of harsh devotional practices and unreflected beliefs when I was younger. Even then, my "hard on myself" wasn't really: I couldn't take fasting without getting dizzy and fainting, for example. But in some sense, this kind of Lent -- fasts and haircloth and vigils and "let's increase our self-hatred by watching Jesus getting beaten up" -- is like the statues before they are covered. It's a way to "do something," to make oneself feel holy. Like jogging or going on a diet is healthy for one's body, ascetic and devotional practices can be healthy and good for the soul. Nevertheless, just as healthy diet doesn't always prevent illness, prayer and self-deprivation don't always protect one from the "shadow of death" (today's Tract was from Ps. 23), that is, the experience of separation from God. Just as sickness is more painful for a generally healthy person, deprivation of Divine light is yet more painful for someone who once knew God, or felt as if she had known God. How much easier it would be if one had no experience of God whatsoever! But this is not how things are.

"Carrying them"

2009-01-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

I recall one of the meaner Dilbert strips: an administrative assistant mentions to the epinonymous engineer in passing, "My son is failing all his classes. I'd like him to get a career in computers." Dilbert answers unwisely, "What -- carrying them?" His dejected look on the third panel seems to convey a mixture of guilt at his careless remark, and the sad realization of its truth.

"Carrying them" is something an engineer might say at a party to his nerdy friends. It's an easy thought for an educated person who lives by his skills, when he considers the horde of apparently willfully ignorant American youth with the illusion of privilege -- the same frat-boy types who made his childhood miserable. But when I face a mother who says to me more or less what Dilbert's coworker said, how do I respond? How do I tell her what she secretly knows -- that young folk with no drive for success will no longer be able to reap the benefits of their parents' hard work? The wise thing then is to say nothing, and contemplate the mixture of good fortune, hard work, and privilege (at least the privilege of proper upbringing that taught one to value education) that got one as far as one has gotten.

Poem: "For i know well"

2008-11-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

For i know well the spring that flows and runs,
although it is day -- daylight's bright blasts
blunt, no angel's arrow but an iron sledge, and
then the darkness that is no night.

That eternal spring is hidden, for i know well
the crossing where, gurgling through conduits,
it erodes and accretes. donning a hard hat and
safety line, i crawled once down, rust-smeared
coughing and retching at the residue of night.

i know that nothing else is so beautiful, and
to cross over required to drink there but once.
the italian did, fantasy-lost. night follows.

i know well that it is bottomless, and no one
is able to cross without tasting its breath of
salt and fog. on the hill seals' barking lures
the eye over the eucalyptus, where whales beach
and Adam's sons slip through cold into night.

its clarity is never darkened, and i know that
the edge draws the gaze down to the sharp point
reflecting and emitting, although it is night.

i know that its streams are so brimming, they
erode the pillars, rust iron skeletons and cut
channels through earth, under cover of night.

i know well the stream that flows from this spring
cuts bedrock but one foot a year, but for one who
dares into the tunnel, the bricks tremble underfoot
and the bulb's high overhead flicker threatens night.

i know the stream proceeding from these two, that
one needs no hard hat to explore, though the shirt
that protects is a shirt of flames, and of night.

this eternal spring is hidden in the cave lake's
waters, in the cup of the blue flower, the chalice
of the silent covenant, the covenant of night.

it is here calling out to creatures; under the
pillars it has spread its stone altar where they
satisfy their dark thirst, because it is night.

this living spring i long for and do not see, i do
not see the living spring where the canary falls
and the walls tremble, where the water smells of
rust and old wine and sorrows' forgetfulness and
the other side's shining face, where it is night.

-- based on "Que Bien Sé Yo la Fuente" by St. John of the Cross.

Dignus est agnus: the Feast of Christ the King

2008-10-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, our schola sang the Introit for the Feast of Christ the King (yes, it's October, we use an older calendar): "Dignus est agnus...". You might know the English text from the Handel setting: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain...". Here is a source text for the Introit: Revelations 5:12:

...dignus est agnus qui occisus est accipere virtutem et divinitatem et sapientiam et fortitudinem et honorem et gloriam et benedictionem...

("Worthy is the lamb who was slain to accept power and divinity and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing..."). I was daydreaming during the long sermon and noticed a bit of word-painting in the Gregorian melody. Words referring to earthly power, such as "virtutem," tend to be lower in pitch (and with a Fa tonal center), whereas words referring to spiritual characteristics such as divinity or wisdom have a higher tonal center (either So with the hard hexachord, or La).

At that time, the priest then started addressing the Gospel reading in his sermon, which was from Pilate's interrogation of Jesus in John 18. It's worth repeating part of the interrogation here (John 18:33-38 NAB):

So Pilate went back into the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?" Pilate answered, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants (would) be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here." So Pilate said to him, "Then you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" When he had said this, he again went out to the Jews and said to them, "I find no guilt in him.

Jesus never gives a straight answer to Pilate's question, "Are you a king?" The most interesting response to me is, "You say I am a king." To me, this suggests that Pilate didn't understand what Jesus meant by "My kingdom does not belong to this world..." Pilate understands "king" in particular as the potential leader of a revolt against Roman rule in Palestine, but more generally as a secular ruler: someone who deals in worldly power. Jesus understands "king" entirely differently: "You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." His dominion is voluntarily accepted by his subjects: "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

The word painting in the Gregorian introit melody hints at the story of Revelations, which is the Son of God assuming his authority over the world. He accepts both power over the "lower" earth, and the divinity which is rightfully his from the beginning. I've suggested to Gregorian scholae that they keep in mind the Throne Room March in Star Wars while singing this introit. Both pieces have a heroic minor mode, and both tell the story of victory and authority over evil obtained through suffering and sacrifice. The hero comes before the throne to receive the power and grace that was his by birth, which he relinquished for a greater cause and now receives once again with even greater honor. In that sense, one can read Jesus' saying, "You say I am a king," as a willing relinquishment of his rightful title. He could have claimed it and the honor and power that were his due, but he chose to lay it down instead.

Act and Intention

2008-10-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

Last week, we were idly watching a television program called "Ghost Adventures." In each episode, a crew of three is locked inside a place purported to be haunted, and they attempt to document visual and auditory supernatural phenomena. In the program we watched, the three visited a nightclub widely considered the residence of demons, and taunted them in order to evoke a manifestation (with apparent success). (The episode wisely included some footage of an Old Catholic exorcist bishop in Kentucky chastising the show's host for his foolhardiness, and explaining that the real threat posed by demons is not physical but spiritual.)

What I'm writing about is not whether or not taunting demons is a bad idea (you can judge for yourself!), but something that the host briefly said during the crew's "lockdown" in the haunted basement. They were in a room purported to have housed satanic rituals. The host lit some candles, and arranged them in a circle, asking a crew member to sit there and watch for possible phenomena. However, the host was careful to state as he placed the candles that the circle was randomly arranged and was not meant as "a satanic ritual or anything like that."

The host's phrase irritated me at first, because the practice of casting a circle occurs commonly in many forms of ritual magic and has nothing necessarily to do with "devil worship." (Presumably the connection has to do with figures like Aleister Crowley, along with the usual misunderstandings about non-Christian religious practices.) However, the Gospel reading this Sunday (23th Sunday after Pentecost) put the host's saying in perspective. The reading was Matthew 9:18-26, in particular the cure of the woman suffering hemorrhages. I was reminded of Mark's account of the same episode:

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who has touched my clothes?" But his disciples said to him, "You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, 'Who touched me?'" And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction."

I like Mark's version better both because it's more touching (you hear more of the woman's story) and because it's more "raw" than Matthew's account. Mark tells an interesting detail about Jesus' reaction to the woman's touch: he asks, "Who touched me?", even though he is in the middle of a crowd pressing on him from all sides. Imagine asking "who touched me?" in the middle of Times Square at rush hour! However, in a crowd, the act of touching is generally intentionless, or rather a byproduct of unrelated intention: I want to get close enough to have a good look at this Jesus guy, or I'm trying to push through this annoying crowd to buy some groceries from the market, or I'm just caught in the middle and trying to figure out what's going on. In contrast, the suffering woman touches Jesus with fully deliberate intent: "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Jesus in turn responds not to the act of touching, but to the intentional act, the act combined with deliberate intent.

This helped me understand why the host of "Ghost Adventures" might have said what he did. He was in a room where he thought satanic rituals might have been held (a "ritually and supernaturally charged space"), and doing something that he considered charged with spiritual significance (putting candles in a circle around someone). Therefore, he thought it necessary to announce his intent: the arrangement was "random" and "not a satanic ritual." The phenomenon resembles something that a Catholic priest once mentioned regarding the Consecration: at times, it would be necessary to consecrate bread and wine not on the physical altar in front of him, so he would consecrate with the intention to include a particular physical space. He didn't use these terms, but one could say that Eucharistic consecration normally includes an "implicit intention" (i.e., "the bread and wine on the altar in front of me"), but may also include an "explicit intention" which covers unusual circumstances. (Say the priest has to say Mass in a bread factory on a table made of stacked-up full wine bottles: the priest might want to make an explicit intention only to consecrate the elements meant for the sacrifice, and not the surrounding bread or wine.)

Jesus' sensitivity to human intention meant that he could tell the difference between accidental touch and meaningful touch. What's most interesting, however, is that Jesus doesn't even seem to know who touched him, until the woman identifies herself. It's as if her faith alone effects the cure: "Daughter, your faith has saved you." This shows the power of intention in the supernatural world. One could say that the only effects there are willed effects: there is no accident.

Asking questions

2008-09-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, I was flipping through Thomas Merton's little pamphlet on how to approach Scripture. He pointed out an example of the typical master-disciple exchange in Zen Buddhism: the disciple asks, "Who is the Buddha?", and the master replies, "Who are you?" The surface interpretation of this dialog is that you are the Buddha and I am the Buddha and everybody is the Buddha so let's all be happy hippies all together now. Merton explains it in a different way: the disciple goes to the master looking for facts, for doctrine to fill in the blanks in her spiritual worksheet. In reply, the master offers a question instead of an answer. Knowledge of the Buddha is not doctrine but experience, and therefore it requires a process of internal reflection and self-discovery ("Who are you?").

Interpreted a different way, this is what good advisors do with their students. If the answer to a question is known, it can be found in some journal paper or textbook. Instead, good advisors offer questions, because the process of scientific insight and discovery cannot begin without a good question. Long experience in a field develops the ability to ask the right questions, rather than the ability to accumulate knowledge. (Perhaps this is why among professors, good lecturers are much harder to find than good researchers!)

Bio of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin: following Beatrice?

2008-08-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, while traveling, I read a biography of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas. It reads much like one would expect from a biography written by journalists in 1977: a lot of chronology, some of it not particularly interesting, and some sympathy. I've been dipping into "The Human Phenomenon" (formerly known as "The Phenomenon of Man") in a new translation, and finding it very insightful. Unfortunately, that kind of book is impossible to read in short bursts (for me at least!), so I have trouble making progress.

I learned two surprising things about the good Father from the biography. The first is his apparent failure to learn anything from China about humanity, after having spent so many years there. He observed the lack of interest in spiritual matters of ordinary Chinese people, and found it alien and disconcerting. The almost self-annihilating spiritual drive of many Hindus in India, in contrast, gave him a reference point against which he could argue: it said (according to him) that "matter is bad," whereas he said "matter is good." It didn't seem to occur to Teilhard to try to account for a cultural disinterest in "spiritualization" in his views on human development.

The second thing I learned was that Teilhard also had something to say about noncorporeal "sex magick," a topic which I've discussed on this blog before. The biographers considered Teilhard's work "The Evolution of Chastity" as mainly a reflection on his personal situation with Lucile Swan -- a woman with whom he carried on a long-term platonic relationship. What's interesting about the work is that he comes to many of the same conclusions as did Charles Williams and other male authors: from the male perspective, heterosexual expression should or will evolve away from the physical and towards the spiritual.

As I read this passage in the biography, it occurred to me that Teilhard, along with other male authors who had expressed these views, was making an implicit assumption of causality. We observe this: Men often experience "the feminine" as diffuse, rather than strongly individuated. These authors seem to associate diffuseness with abstraction, and like Plato, abstraction with moral elevation. By abstracting one's relationships, they seem to say, one can reach upwards towards "das Ewig-Weibliche," or "Yin," or whatever one chooses to call the Platonic form of Womanhood. They seem to neglect another explanation of the above observation: men could experience the feminine as diffuse, simply because the human male tends towards polygamy or polyamory. Men -- perhaps some more than others -- must consciously choose to make their experience of Womanhood concrete and singular.

It's interesting that men like Charles Williams and Teilhard felt how they did for women who were outside lawful monogamous bounds: CW, for one not his wife (Phyllis Jones), and Teilhard, despite his vow of celibacy, for an arguably spoiled dilettante artist with a childish fascination for the mysterious French Jesuit. Were CW and Teilhard projecting their diffuse desires onto their metaphysics? I shouldn't speculate into their motives, and I should also point out that both relationships were resolved with moral uprightness. Fr. Teilhard also was close friends with Lucile Swan at times when he had little support and needed a lot of friendship and love. Rather than judging these men harshly, we should look into the phenomenon itself and try to understand why they saw the direction of causality pointing one way instead of another.

Don't send me an MS Word form to fill out...

2008-08-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

(here comes a rant, watch out)

...because I can't read it. Not because I don't own a copy of Windows and haven't run it for over five years. Not because I'm a "geeky Microsoft hater." It's because MS Word files aren't even compatible with past or future versions of MS Word on Windows itself, let alone on Mac. It's because there's no free .docx to .doc conversion service anywhere on the web, even though the 'softies bribed the ISO committee to get OOXML (hahahaha, OBJECT-ORIENTED XML?!?!? that's like "MS Visual Object-Oriented COBOL") accepted as a standard. It's because the lovely ad-hoc tables that you hacked up in MS Word between visits to Cute Overload collapse into an overlapping jumble of typography unless the margins are set to the exact same number of millifurlongs as yours, even though the margin setting doesn't happen to be a part of your document. It's because you e-mail me a form, then expect me to print it out, fill it out by hand, and FAX it (remember that lovely '80s all-caps trademark? oh wait, you were just a twinkle in your father's eye then!), complete with my credit card number all in plain-text, to some random phone number in another state.

You could send... ASCII? Unicode? a web form? a PDF even, which I could print out, fill out by hand, scan in, and send to you via encrypted e-mail (because you've put your public keys on the website, right?)? Alternately, if you happen to reject post-1950's technology, you could send a physical piece of paper via traditional physical mail, which I could fill out by hand and put in a paper envelope with a money order and send back to you?

Submission to rubrics is submission to God

2008-08-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

Recently, on an e-mail list, someone asked for advice on how to help make an Office liturgy over which (s)he was presiding more prayerful. I've heard other people ask this question too -- someone in our schola, who is new to the 1962 Roman Missal liturgy, was asking how to make it more about prayer and less about frantically flipping through various books and guessing at the right tones for responses. It's easy to understand how a quiet, prayerful person might find it very stressful to fiddle with books and worry about what to do next during the sacred liturgy. Maybe I'm just hardened to it as someone who has been through a lot of different liturgies in the choir loft! I'm convinced, though, that the busyness required to provide music for the liturgy can be an act of prayer in itself. Something that helps me is to remember that liturgy is about submission to structure leading to submission to God. When one is bound to the rubrics, one is not free to say or do whatever comes to mind. This in itself already exercises one's humility and is a prayerful act. (Not that spontaneity doesn't have its place, but the liturgy is mostly about following and not about creating.)

When I cantor in our local schola, I am bound to blend in with the voice of the other cantor, and to help the other schola members come in at the right time. We am bound to follow the director, who is bound to follow the actions of the priest and to help the congregation do their part. The priest is bound to celebrate the liturgy in a fitting way, and the congregation is bound to offer fitting worship. All of us are willingly bound together to worship God, and the Christ whom we worship is also willingly bound. All of this binding is sweet, like the swaddling clothes with which Mary wrapped the baby Jesus (see this Office hymn), or the priest's vestments at Mass. It's tight sometimes (imagine you're a new monk, it's 4am in the dead of winter, and you have to find out on the spot whether it's a Greater Double of the First Class or the Second Class), but it's there to help us out.

In a way, any mistake a presider makes or confusion that the congregation has is an act of worship -- it confesses the desire of presider and congregation to follow. The fact that one can "make a mistake" says that one isn't just making things up as one goes along. The more complicated the rules, the more one has to submit oneself to them.

Cabbage heads

2008-08-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

Wer Buergerblaetter liest wird blind und taub...

Feeding the body and the spirit

2008-06-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

Today's Gospel reading (Sixth Sunday after Pentecost) was from Mark 8. I always remember how the commentators on this "feeding of the multitude" passage identify this crowd with the crowd that shouted, "Crucify him!" In their mind, the people who came to hear Jesus were too limited to see beyond the pressing needs of their empty stomachs. Once this new prophet couldn't fill their bellies, they bent easily before the propaganda of their religious leaders.

There is an undertone of dualist elitism in this interpretation. It suggests that the masses are only capable of understanding gross physical satisfaction, and only the disciples (barely!) can rise above primitive fleshly desires to consider spiritual matters. Furthermore, Jesus himself says that they [the crowd] "have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat." They don't seem to mind physical deprivation in order to hear the Good News -- unlike the disciples, who brought just enough bread and fish for themselves to hold out through Jesus' long-winded sermons!

One could say that Jesus' concern for the crowd echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Jesus realizes that he can't make much more progress on their spiritual needs until he fulfills their physical ones. However, Maslow's pyramid can also serve a more subtle form of dualist elitism: those who are "self-actualized" have "ascended" through the levels of baser need-seeking to reach the top, where they have achieved contentness within themselves. The rest bumble around at varying levels of baseness -- either wondering where to find some scraps of food and a place to sleep tonight, fearfully casting their votes for the candidate who promises to be tough on terrorists, or trying to get their boss to respect their not-so-unselfishly-motivated hard work. There is a taste of the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election here: those who appear to be saved are saved, and those deprived are destined to various levels of eternal deprivation.

Jesus himself doesn't say anything of the sort. It seems he realizes innocently and perhaps even naively that he has talked for three days straight, and that those folks, who walked all the way out to the middle of nowhere to seek and listen to him, are in danger: "If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will collapse on the way, and some of them have come a great distance." Jesus isn't handing out the "bread" part of "bread and circuses"; he isn't interested in pandering to a disinterested crowd, but his audience here is not disinterested.

I heard a good sermon today explaining this passage as Jesus giving us a template for the form of the Eucharistic liturgy. The priest's arguments made sense, but I was thinking the whole time about what I wrote above: there probably really were a whole bunch of very hungry people whom Jesus fed, and that physical hunger is just as relevant as the symbolic, allegorical, or liturgical interpretations of the story. The key phrase is "just as relevant" -- not more, nor less. The demonstration of the structure of the Divine Liturgy is just as important as the exhibition of Jesus' practical compassion.

Beatrice or succubus? the male author's Muse

2008-06-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

Many male authors, composers, and scholars in the Western canon took as their inspiration a spiritualized female figure. The Greeks gave us their Muses, with their corresponding mythology of creativity. For example, we refer to an author's "muse" interchangeably as either an actual woman who inspires him, or as an abstract spirit of inspiration. Dante Alighieri's Beatrice is perhaps the most notable specific instance. The author's "La Vita Nuova" and "Divine Comedy" detail the process by which an actual, living Florentine woman (Bice di Folco Portinari) was transformed from a passing fancy, into a spiritual guide who leads Dante to the very face of God. A lesser-known example is Sophie von Kuehn, the wife of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). After Sophie passed away at the young age of 16, she inspired the young philosopher and mining engineer to produce an entire body of unique verse, prose, and essays, by which he is credited as a father of early German Romanticism. Inscribed in Novalis' wedding ring was the phrase "Sophia sei mein Schutzgeist" ("Sophie, be my guardian spirit"), and he often played on the Greek meaning of her name: "Wisdom," frequently personified in the Judeo-Christian tradition as a noble woman.

This spiritualization of the Muse is a process, rather than a static attribute. It happens primarily in the mind of the creative male subject, rather than to the female object. The last line of Goethe's Faust summarizes this process: "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" ("The Eternal Feminine draws us on"). Man first experiences love as concrete and sexual (whether consummated or not). Then, circumstances (unfulfilled love, separation, and perhaps even the death of the beloved) train him to disembody and spiritualize that love so that it becomes a spiritual guide. The lover is drawn on by the noble beloved to seek higher and more noble things.

The training of the lover by the beloved is a familiar theme from courtly love. This is particularly fitting since the troubadour often sings from the first-person perspective of the male lover: the unattained beloved inspires beautiful music, even as she draws out his weeping and sighs. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival," for instance, the protagonist's wife is named Condwiramurs, which means "love guide." Wolfram changes her name from Blanchefleur, by which she appears in his source material (Chr�tien de Troyes' "Perceval"), so as to emphasize how the thought of her guides Parzival on his many lonely journeys and eventually draws him out of religious despair and back to his quest for the Grail.

This name change also highlights Wolfram's deliberate and arguably awkward choice to desexualize her first encounter with Parzival, in which she convinces him to defend her town from a siege. Chr�tien simply has her seduce the naive young Parzival, who happened to be passing through her town during the siege. In contrast, Wolfram emphasizes her chaste intentions: She visits him at night specifically to convince him to fight for her home, but has no sexual intentions. It is nevertheless a sexually charged encounter: she crawls into his bed, clutches him, and weeps. One should also recall the habit of the time to sleep in the nude. However, "nothing happens," though Parzival had acted less than nobly with another woman before (he robbed her of her jewelry and nearly raped her). She asks him "not to wrestle" (i.e., not to exploit her vulnerable position so as to have sex with her), and Parzival honors this request. Here, it's the woman who drives the desexualization process; in other cases, circumstances drive it. For example, Dante rarely saw Beatrice, and eventually she married another man and passed away at age 24. Novalis lost his young wife after only three years of marriage. Parzival does eventually return to Condwiramurs, but only after finding the Grail.

Sometimes, men enter into this separation process deliberately, rather than letting circumstances bring it to them. For example, the New York Times recently interviewed a Buddhist couple who have taken an unorthodox vow of conjugal celibacy. Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi form an analogous (though much less extreme) pair in the Western Christian tradition. Francis, himself first a troubadour, chooses a religious life of poverty and preaching, and ordains Clare into the religious life. Some stories even have the young Francis fall in love with Clare, and others depict him as dying in her arms. In a traditional Roman Catholic parish last weekend, the pastor defended priestly celibacy in his sermon by arguing that though priests in ancient times were allowed to be married, they were required to live apart from their wives after ordination. (Whether this is true or not is less interesting than the fact that he mentions it!)

Situations such as this exploit the tension between spiritual companionship and sexual desire. At times this tension has theurgical overtones. On occasion it finds expression directly in terms of the sexual act: for instance, Chinese emperors of the Qing Dynasty were taught that forestalling ejaculation whenever possible would magically add years to their life. More often, it takes a more abstract form as "courtly love" nonsexual relationships. Charles Williams, the 20th century English author and poet, was reputed to have followed this practice. Williams would have been well aware of the theurgical implications from his training in the Western esoteric tradition. In that tradition, nonsexual theurgical relationships later devolved into actual sexual practice (what many self-identifying neopagans call "sex magick"), as described for example in the novels of Dion Fortune. The fundamental idea in these nonsexual relationships is to generate sexual tension, and then by resisting its physical expression, "sublimate" it into a higher spiritual force. This makes the Muse a vessel for creative intellectual work, just as the female body serves (in arguably sexist magical thinking) as the vessel of creation in physical terms.

In his short story "Calliope," Neal Gaiman unites the intellectual and physical roles of the Muse: his protagonist author regains his creativity by magically enslaving and physically raping the Greek Muse Calliope. This illustrates the dark side of the spiritualized female figure: she remains Object to the male as Subject. He creates alone, without her cooperation, and projects an image upon her which obscures her actual identity and makes her ever more divorced from reality. She dies, lies unconscious in a coma (as described fictionally in Williams' 1931 novel "Many Dimensions," whose female protagonist some have argued was modeled after his lover Phyllis Jones), or is simply inaccessible and therefore ever more ripe for projection. Furthermore, Dante Alighieri and Charles Williams were married (not to their Muses), and Novalis was engaged to marry Julie von Charpentier the year after Sophie's death (though he died before their marriage). Keeping a Muse was for them a kind of intellectual (and actual, in Williams' case!) adultery.

Williams did, however, understand well the consequences of this projection process. In his 1937 novel "Descent into Hell," one of his male characters descends so deeply into a fantasized relationship with a particular woman, that his fantasies become a succubus that leads him to despair and suicide. While undergoing this process, he encounters the actual woman, and she is so taken with fear that she flees from him: he has detached the fantasy entirely from reality. Despite Williams' dabbling in the darker aspects of Muse-keeping, one need only read his collected letters to his wife Florence Conway ("To Michal from Serge") to learn the depths of his intense and very real love for her. Novalis may have transformed his first wife into a "Schutzgeist," but he still weeps at her tomb, as depicted in "Hymn to the Night." One also sees in the "Divine Comedy" how even the spiritualized Beatrice is still very much a woman who attracts Dante, whose shining eyes and half-mocking smile have a power over him which is chaste but by no means nonsexual. The examples of these three authors -- Dante Alighieri, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Charles Williams -- show the moral tension of taking on a Muse, but also show the importance and value of staying grounded in the reality of the female person -- physical, spiritual, intellectual, intelligent, an equal Subject in her own right.

The dreadful process of self-deception

2008-05-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article in Rolling Stone linked from BoingBoing, called "Jesus Made Me Puke." It's easy to expect just sheer (though deserved) mockery from such an article (in which a reporter infiltrates a fundamentalist Christian weekend retreat and tells all), but he makes a valuable point in a couple of paragraphs:

After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you're intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you're swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

He goes on to say,

For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath.

What's startling here is the vast capacity of the human person for self-deception, not necessarily even as a deliberate act, but merely as a weary, gradual assent to external pressure -- a pressure which is applied by a vast crowd of those who are going through the process of self-deception themselves. It's easy for us educated, sophisticated, BoingBoing and Rolling Stone - reading types to push these "middle America fundies" to the margins of our perception, but hard to realize that at the very root, there's surprisingly little difference between them and us.

I discovered this most recently when observing how many vocal Hollywood stars and activists in the West reacted to the recent troubles in Tibet. It was very easy for them to shout condemnations, but I didn't see any of them examine the real reasons behind this particular incident, or question why they should support this particular cause. The trouble was not with the expression of personal opinion, but with the lack of intellectual justification for these opinions. Why should Tibet be "free"? Who wants to support (financially and militarily) a "free Tibet" once it exists? What happens if we base national sovereignty on ethnicity? Why should we pay attention to some faraway land in another faraway country's possession when we have our own darker history (and arguably, present) of oppression and marginalization of Native Americans at home?

The Tibet incident was distressing for me, much like the Rolling Stone reporter was distressed to find himself swaying to the "Praise & Worship" band. I had been involved in protests against the (second) Iraq War, and had considered my "side" somewhat more enlightened than the other. Yet, with the recent Tibet issue, I found a lot of people on "my side" doing something perhaps equally ill-conceived and unreflective, and the "thugs and goons" on the other side actually for once not. It was a painful reality check to realize that otherwise educated and fairly intelligent people could close their eyes to any information that opposes their views, just as the other supposedly ignorant and low-born people had done before. (Doesn't the constant mockery of "middle America" sound a lot like bourgeois derision of the peasant class? Recall that the word "boor" shares a root with "Bauer," the German word for "farmer.")

A big part of this process of self-deception must be the "mass effect," which is what the Rolling Stone reporter feels. If he had been alone in an auditorium with the preacher for the whole weekend, he probably wouldn't have been able to carry on with his facade for very long. If I spend all of my time hanging out with pro-Tibet protesters, then it will generate in me a community mentality that makes it hard for opposing information to penetrate. Likewise, if I only hang around with pro-China protesters (there are such people, and large numbers of them!), I'll start to see China as "my team" and will have a hard time accepting opposing news.

The most distressing part (here's where I go a little bit Kierkegaard) is that even if I don't join a group, even if I deliberately spurn groups so as to gain a supposedly more objective and elevated viewpoint, I am still quite capable of self-deception. The very claim of objectivity is itself subjective. It's impossible to avoid influencing the world economy, because even if you strip off all products of civilization and run naked into the forest to forage for nuts and berries, you're _not_ buying some article of clothing sewn by some factory worker in a distant country. If you gather enough followers, that factory worker might have to find a different line of work. Rejecting globalization is itself an act within globalization. Similarly, claiming objectivity by rejecting group membership is itself belonging to a de facto group, whose members often refuse to hear the perhaps legitimate reasons that others have for joining their groups. (The words "evangelical atheist" perhaps come to mind.) Living in a groupless world, these people reinforce each other's scorn of membership through a constant stream of verbal and written chatter.

I'm not sure how to deal with this problem of persistent self-deception. I can only close with a quote from one of Søren Kierkegaard's journals, taken from Charles Williams' "The New Christian Year":

To thee, O God, we turn for peace . . . but grant us too the blessed assurance that nothing shall deprive us of that peace, neither ourselves, nor our foolish, earthly desires, nor my wild longings, nor the anxious cravings of my heart.

The leap of faith begins in the inner room

2008-05-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

Ascensiontide sermons often criticize the disciples of Jesus for remaining in the inner room after Jesus' departure, rather than "going out to all the nations, baptizing them." They either make the disciples into cowards, trembling behind locked doors, or assert their incapability of spreading the faith without the particular gifts of Pentecost. One forgets that Jesus had already sent them out two-by-two, to spread the Gospel, heal the sick, and cast out demons. Locking the doors must have been a reasonable security measure, rather than an expression of irrational fear. Once we let go of our premature, possibly hypocritical judgment, we can see what they were doing in the upper room: praying together, with Mary Coredemptrix and Priest, awaiting the promised coming of the Advocate. In this awaiting, they are already executing the leap of faith that Jesus demands of them: to face the paradox of a God whom we actually have perceived, who even has real power over life and death, but who draws himself back from human contact and silently asks us to deal with life and death by ourselves. When one is despair asks, "Where is God?", that one asks not whether God exists, but why God doesn't come down and resolve the situation by force. To relinquish force -- to overcome the gross by the subtle -- is the characteristic of the Christ as Christians know him. This is the leap of faith: to face the paradox in prayer, in the inner room.

Chant workshop announcement

2008-05-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Gregorian chant workshop on 17 May in Oceanside, CA: Here is the flyer.

Sermon: "Viri Galilaei"

2008-05-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

Viri Galilaei, quid statis aspicientes in caelum? Hic Jesus, qui assumptus est a vobis in caelum, sic veniet, quemadmodum vidistis eum euntem in caelum. -- Actus Apostolorum 1:11

The "Men of Galilee" passage is one of my favorites -- both for the glorious Gregorian Introit with that text, and for the way in which the angels chide the Apostles: "Why do you stand here looking at the sky?". The image of a dirty, rag-tag bunch of fishermen staring open-mouthed up at the heavens amuses, even as one thinks of how it really must have felt to watch the Savior depart and wonder what to do next. The deeper meaning startles just as much as the angels' words did: We Christians have to learn to act on our own, ultimately without the assurance that God is leading us or even that we are doing the right thing. "The sky" is a place where people look for answers: from gods, aliens, the stars, "orbs," religious or political figures, famous scientists turned evangelical atheists, Hollywood actors, or any other creatures that inhabit a world seemingly far above our own, and dispense tidbits of wisdom on their own inscrutable schedules. Like the Apostles, we go beyond respecting our position in the celestial hierarchy, to ask that our superiors do our jobs for us; we want to absolve ourselves of the risk of making decisions with limited information. The angels' rhetorical question has another meaning: we must expect to hear only silence from God when we pray. God's preferred mode of communication in this age is, in fact, silence. However, silence also communicates -- it tells us how God wishes us to act, namely, to go forth and make decisions and take risks. But I don't like it! I don't like that God speaks to us with void. Sometimes it feels worse than if there had been no God at all -- then at least we could acknowledge living in an arbitrary universe, and try to make the best of things as they are. (Note that I'm not speaking exclusively of theodicy -- though action-in-the-world is a form of communication. Omnipotence is unnecessary.) Dan Simmons in his "Hyperion Cantos" uses the expression "The Void That Binds." In a way, this captures the problem of a silent God: we perceive the existence of a Divine beyond a doubt, and yet it seems to have nothing to say to us -- yet, it persists in making its presence felt. God doesn't hide entirely from us, despite the lack of communication. Indeed, it's this very presence that "binds" us to worship and follow (which is the meaning of the word "religion" -- to "bind back"). One could call this the Advocate, as Jesus seems to do -- though usually one expects a defense attorney to confer with her clients once in a while! How we might wish that she did -- though we are bound to her and she to us. I do not think even the depths of hell could shut her out.