She’s been wearing contact lenses; so now her beautiful bruised-looking eyes are always in front of me, and it is impossible not to be moved. I wonder — and less idly than this sounds — if I will love her as I ought to some day.
Once, and for millennia, people painted human figures on their jars, carved them into their city gates, made pillars and pilasters of them, wove them into tapestries, painted domed heavens full of them, made paintings of them bent over books or dreaming at windows or taking their ease on the banks of rivers. Human figures decorated lampstands and soup tureens and the spines of books.
Now they seem never to be used decoratively, as things pleasing in themselves. Advertising uses them to part us from our money, implying that we should compare ourselves and our lot to the supposedly acquirable condition of well-being these insinuating images represent to us. … We defend ourselves from the appeal they have for us, just as, if they were [vendors or cadgers in the] flesh, we would resist, or take offense at, their earnest gaze and their firm handshake.
It seems to me that, when we lost our aesthetic pleasure in the human presence as a thing to be looked at and contemplated, at the same time we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it was also grievous or terrible, as the epics and the tragedies and the grandest novels testify. Now when we read history, … we assume that nothing is what it appears to be, that it is less and worse … .
It was the most beautiful grackle who died. His form was plump and cunning even after trauma; his sheen was all over so black it was green-purple; and every, each feather of his was edged with gold, as though God, to pass the fall afternoons, had taken up cloisonne.
“Once, her master woke in the middle of the night to hear Rabia praying in these terms:
” ‘O light of my eyes! Thou knowest well that my keen desire is to carry out Thy commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart. But what can I do when Thou hast made me the slave of a human being?’
“In the morning he called her and told her his decision that, thenceforward, he would serve her, or, if she insisted on leaving, he was willing to free her from bondage.
“Rabia went into the desert to pray. There, she did not learn from a teacher but turned to God himself. …
“As news of her grew, she had many followers. She also had many discussions with the religious leaders of her time. And she had offers of marriage, one even from a king, but she had no time for anything but God. …
“She taught that God must be served for love of Himself and not for fear of hell. She once sang:
” ‘O my God! If I worship Thee for fear of hell, burn me in hell;
If I worship Thee from hope of paradise, bar me from paradise.
But if I worship Thee for Thine own sake,
Grudge me not Thy everlasting Beauty.’
“Rabia was in her mid-eighties when she died; by then, she felt continually united to her Lord. As she told her friends, ‘My Beloved is always with me.’ “
“Why do you call me good? There is none good but one; that is, God” (Jesus to the young ruler).
Why do you call me right? There is none right but one; that is, God.
Why do you call this beautiful? There is none beautiful but one; that is, God.
Why do you call this true? There is none true but one; that is, God.
“And if your right eye would prevent you, pluck it out! It would be better for you to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye …”
Feel this ferocity.
I would rather drag myself bleeding to die on the threshold of the gates of the Kingdom of Truth, Love, Beauty then to live without longing for it, looking for it, living for it …
“Wherein anything is sweet or nourishing, it is [grace of] God. Sin is God-absence. Perverse sin is God-absence willfully attached to God.
“Let us observe a flower. Sweet and beautiful it is God—who thought of it and crafted it. Dry and dead it is God-absence—God leeched out of it. Petals poisoned to slay my lover it is God-absence (God leeched from my lover’s mortal form) wilfully attached to God (sweet and beautiful).
“Let us contemplate gravity. Pulling me straight and steady to the earth as I stand it is God—who engineered it and sustains it. Plunging me down the stairs it is God-absence—God’s intentions accidentally forgotten. Hurtling my enemy toward implacable pavement from seven stories up it is God-absence (God’s intentions ignored) willfully attached to God (pulling him straight and steady).
“Let us listen to a song. Harmonizing and prancing it is God—who computed it and is gladdened by it. Gone off-key it is God-absence—God’s frequencies mismeasured. Jinglingly advising me to perceive women as harlots it is God-absence (God’s love scoffed) willfully attached to God (hear it harmonizing and prancing). …”
“Indeed, it is my theory that God-absence is not natural to a universe and that the Eden-story is evidence of that. In the beginning, I propose, there was no God-absence and no deranging mixtures of God-absence and God. Instead, there was God only, with all his reason, peace, beauty, bounty, love—and there was the possibility of a wish to oppose him. For where there is more than one will, there is the possibility that one will wishes to oppose another. And when God perceived that one will (and here I speak of the Serpent) wished to oppose him, he granted it God-absence—for there is no other way a will can be free. For all that is is God, and God cannot oppose God—only what is not is not God. And so God granted the Serpent God-absence and with that perversion of God—but he kept it out of Eden.
“He kept it out of Eden, but he, foreknowing that a free will may wish to oppose him, provided our Parents’ wills a way. Then the Serpent spake and offered God (‘God is wise’) mixed with God-absence (‘you may be wise as he’, God’s primacy denied)—and our Parents’ wills wished it.
“And then did God curse them and the whole world, and he rent himself, partly, from his universe, with ah! what pangs—and God-absence entered it. Deterioration, famine, forgetting—and Death—entered it. God cursed our Parents and their curses were a picture of earth’s new fractured piebald state—the fruitful ground was now coupled with the endlessness of tilling, the joyful birth was now paired with the agony of bearing.”
“But God did not curse us forever, nor can a universe bear to be, even partly, long reft from him. Earth and skies will someday be reborn—a new Eden.
“Now these are the measures of the world’s current fracture: absence of God, in famine, death, decay; and the mixing of absence-of-God and God to willfully oppose him, in lies, boasts, war.
“And here is a golden needle to thread the gap and and mend the universe: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.’ It proves it is the golden needle because it fits the measures of the gap. First, ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’ implies that we not do to others as we would not have them do to us: this spans the latter gap by stopping our willful opposition of God—we stop harming God and each other. Second (and the needle shows itself even longer, even brighter): ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’ spans the former gap by filling the absence of God—‘Do feed the hungry, do clothe the poor, do fix the broken, do build the beautiful’—we do for each other as God did for our Parents in Eden.
“In fine, there is no reasonable way to pretend that, could every person in the world, every moment in time, do to others as he would have them do to him, the world’s fracture would not be mended. And so the golden needle proves it fits our world’s gaps precisely—and so proves our Savior who spoke it to us—it is one way he is proved.
“This is all I have to say about the Eden-story tonight.”
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod—
and all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil,
and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent:
There lives the dearest freshness, deep-down things.
And, though the last lights off the black west went—
oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs!
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
world broods with warm breast and with—ah!—bright wings.
—Gerard Hopkins
From oldest times, peoples of the north have defied the deadly winters with traditions of warmth and cheer. I love the Yule winter ways, the green and red and gold, the fragrant smells; fireplaces and eggnog and holly are favorite things of mine.
It is the way of the world for the powerful to overcome the weak. Indeed, were all according to base propensity, the most potent king would be the most oppressive. But Infinite Power (because he is Infinite Love) instead gave himself to be oppressed as it is possible to be—reviled and falsely tried and killed. Thus the way of the world was upended, the curse broken (and curse it is—not only for the oppressed, but for they who strive for power, whose end is mutual destruction—is this not more evident than ever in the days of nuclear arms?)—and death was made infinite life. And we too will live if we do as he, venturing our lives gladly for Truth, Love, Beauty and for the oppressed.
In winter, when earth is deadest, comes Christmas, whose evergreens and candles are—ah—unexpected and bravest life.
Exoristos
Porter Doran
Iannes
Epiktetos
Anonymous
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