In the Midst of the Fire

A. The Quarry is Here

The Kingdom of God by Jessica Powers
Not toward the stars, O beautiful naked runner,
not on the hills of the moon after a wild white deer,
seek not to discover afar the unspeakable wisdom,-
the quarry is here…

1. Repentance:  What I have to ascertain is the laws under which I live. My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself.

If I were to characterize our definite images of the world and of man as the "first materials" of the imagination, the very externality of the term would seem to be an admission that there are materials of the imagination that have an existence prior to being touched by the spirit and attitude of man-that are, as it were, free and unstained by thought or theology.

The use of the term "first materials" would thus commit me to an aesthetic I consider highly dubious, one that assumes we can act in a "free" area of the imagination, in which all ideas about the finite, as well as all theology, are relegated to the category of secondary and even extrinsic imaginative acts. If I acceded to this, I should be well on the way to viewing poetry as "pure poetry" and to an understanding of theology as purely "celestial."

If I try to use a less innocuous term than "materials," and call our first images the "first facts" of the imagination, I am again in trouble, for I am making an autonomizing declaration that a fact is a fact is a fact, just as a rose is a rose is a rose, without having determined the dimensions of such facts, or how many levels of being or of human sensibility are possibly involved in them. The difficulty becomes if anything a little more acute if I use instead the phrase, "first problem of the imagination," to describe the finite. For the word "problem" is anything but innocuous: it is connotative, and, as it is often used, would seem to be saying here that the imagination is a high and glorious faculty, born with an intent desire to produce insight and to bring us to some kind of absolute, but that between us and these goals lie the rough, limiting contours of the finite, as a kind of obstacle. When we speak of problems, we speak of things that are irritatingly in the way. And this is the way a certain kind of artist looks theologically at the whole finite world. Thus we see prefigured, in this difficulty of vocabulary, some of the questionable attitudes toward the finite with which this chapter, among other things, will concern itself. ‘…..From Commentary on Apollo and Christ

2.  Jesus is the True Light, the true Word of God.  Now we must search with and for True Lanterns through the abyss of chaos.

·                            people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthfulness: youth is in itself the yet unburdened state - so we worship youthful looks as the sign and symbol of that craving, almost the promise of its fulfillment. But to attempt to keep it for ever only leads to sterility in every sense: monstrous perversion of youth, destined as blossom of the fruit...

o                    Broken Lights Diaries 1953-54 [Ida F. Gorres]

• We're always being told that the Fall had nothing whatever to do with sex. No, I can't believe this any more...Not that procreation, as such, would never have been without the Fall. That's nonsense, to my mind; but somehow or other it would have been different...If it's true that St Thomas held other and more optimistic views on this subject, this doesn't disconcert me one bit. Maybe an angel-type, as he was, endowed with the charism of virginity, would be incapable of realizing the depth of the Fall in this domain. What is always attributed to the latent Manicheism in St Augustine might well be the realism of experience.
• Broken Lights p. 90-91 Diaries 1951-1952 [Ida F. Gorres]

3.  The body/soul dualism found in later Christianity is not found in the Bible itself. In the Hebrew scriptures, the self is a unified activity of thinking, feeling, willing, and acting. H. Wheeler Robinson writes, "The idea of human nature implies a unity, not a dualism. There is no contrast between the body and the soul such as the terms instinctively suggest to us."  Oscar Cullmann agrees, noting that "the Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism of body and soul."  In particular, the body is not the source of evil or something to be disowned, escaped, or denied -- though it may be misused. We find instead an affirmation of the body and a positive acceptance of the material order. Lynn de Silva writes:

"Biblical scholarship has established quite conclusively that there is no dichotomous concept of man in the Bible, such as is found in Greek and Hindu thought. The biblical view of man is holistic, not dualistic. The notion of the soul is an immoral entity which enters the body at birth and leaves it at death is quite foreign to the biblical view of man. The biblical view is that man is a unity, he is a unity of soul, body, flesh, mind, etc., all together constituting the whole man."

4.  The Struggle to Love

I Have Forgotten:  "My powers have been taken from me". "Then, please, say a prayer, recite a litany, work a miracle". "Impossible", the Master replied, "I have forgotten everything". They both fell to weeping.  ~Wiesel

City of the Sick and City of the Well  Fr. William Lynch said there is no city of the well and city of the ill…it is all one city.

    After the Fall everyone is wounded and in need of healing.  The degree of frailty on this continuum is vast and dynamic.  It is as vast as the individuality of each created soul.

Oscar Wilde dramatically related the soul’s journey in Dorian Gray and the eventual mirror of who we have chosen to become is starkly shoved before us.

     It is a constantly-changing journey of the heart and soul---in fact, it is eternal.  But it is never as one alone that we become.  We are constantly in a dance concert with others whether we like it or not.

5.  Little by Little:  A little bird came and landed beside me on the bench. It didn’t seem afraid of me at all. It was as if it was sent to comfort me. “Have no fear, you are worth more than many sparrows” I thought. And I tried to take courage. No matter where I go or do not go, You are there, O Lord.[Ps. 139..]

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

• At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

• If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.

     “ We're all in this together, and Christ has knit us together in a way that not even death

         can break."  It is not an "Immanentizing the eschaton"…trying to yank Heaven down to

         Earth  ~Eve Tushnet

• In private one can well be a cat that walks by itself, and without roots in any specific soil: but in the great battle for the Kingdom of God it seems to me one ought to belong to some brotherhood.
• Broken Lights Letters 1951-59

• There's no redder rag for our modern, progressive Catholics than a certain religious approach to sex and Eros ranging from suspicion to open condemnation and branded accordingly as Manichean, neo-Platonic, Puritan, etc. Quite unacceptable. And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time...the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i.e. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.. Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall; in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world.
• Broken Lights p15-16 Diaries 1951 (Ida F. Gorres)

• genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing , nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control.
• Broken Lights p.21 Diaries 1951

• The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus. " For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc.
• Broken Lights p.33 Diaries 1951
• "From time to time I have the feeling that certain instincts [urges? involuntary impulses?] are being annihilated within me, which have hitherto seemed good and perfect: yet as soon as they are destroyed I perceive how evil and imperfect they were." (Catherine of Genoa). This strikes me as very important, for it shows that the judgment of conscience can change, and precisely in someone whose conscience must already have been particularly highly developed, sensitive and illuminated.
• Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

One of the frightening aspects of loving somebody is the way that love can seem to offer unique access not only to pleasure but to truth. Love of another person—not only romantic love, but familial love and deep friendship as well—promises or threatens to reshape us completely. It can become the lens through which we see the world.   ~Eve Tushnet

• What does really happen when the factor of love withdraws from a human relationship? Is it a loss or a gain? Is the real landscape revealed at last, hitherto transfigured, but delusive, too, by the driving mist of fantasy? Is it a perverted vision which finds a glowing cloud more beautiful than the solid truth of a plot of earth? And vice versa, what really happens when the radiance, the glamour, begins to take shape, concentrating on a landscape or on a face?
• Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59

Booth: Redemption through transformation, I get it. What do you believe in Bones?

Brennan: I believe in always swimming with a buddy.

Booth: What?

Brennan: You gather your wisdom and I gather mine.

B.The Crucible

·                     All the time each one of us is hovering above an unfathomable abyss of potential calamities of every kind - sensed in that ever-throbbing pulse deep down in one's heart; as long as this chasm does not open up to devour one, the floating island in any guise whatever must surely be welcome. Wrong notion of God? Asiatic pessimism?

o                    Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

1. “Turned Inside Out”:   “It can sometimes happen that we too are brought down by Christ’s love, into the dust of death….poured out like water…”                      

“It is the terrible experience of seeing oneself slowly turned inside out.  It is the frightful taste of a humility that is not merely a virtue but the very agony of truth.  This ghastly emptying, this inexorable gutting of our own appalling nonentity, takes place under the piercing light of the revealed Word, the light of infinite Truth.  But it is something far more terrible still:  we find ourselves eviscerated by our own ingratitude, under the eyes of Mercy.”

“This is the experience that will come to one who thought he had virtue…who once thought, perhaps, that he loved God indeed, and was God’ good friend and who then, one day, is brought up for judgement, to be purified of all that is too human in his dream.  For he has been cornered and accused, pierced and emptied by the shame of remembering who he really is.  God seems to turn away His Face. God seems to withdraw His protecting Hand, and all the things he treasured that were not God, have wasted away like shadows with the loss of His Presence. This emptiness, this sense of spiritual annihilation which is due to us all as men born in sin and grown old in sin, Christ took upon Himself when it was not due to Him at all and He emptied Himself of all His power and glory in order to descend into the freezing depths of darkness where we had crawled to hide ourselves, cowering in blind despair.”

But because Christ came down into this no-man’s land of sin, to find us and bring us back to His Kingdom, we are able to discover the living God in the very darkness of what seems to be His utter absence.  And, what is more, it may be that we find Him there more truly than when we though we saw Him in the light of our own dim day.”

2.  ‘Dark Lightning’: In the Shadow

…in His Passion…it is a day on which we seem to be buried alive under an inhuman burden of temptation.  Perhaps we may also suffer sickness, physical as well as moral desolation.  But the worst thing of all remains the inescapable vision of our own almost infinite capacity for pettiness and degradation.”

    “O Lord my God, I cry by day, in the night I weep before Thee.

    Let my prayer come before Thee, incline thy ear to my cry.

   For my soul is full of evils and my life is on the verge of the grave…

   Thou has laid me in a deep pit, in darkness, in the abyss.

   Thine indignation weighs upon me and with all Thy waves Thou dost overwhelm me.

   Thou has taken away my friends from me; Thou hast made me abominable to them;

   I am shut up, I can no longer go forth.”

This is practically the only Psalm that ends on a note of complete dejection…

    “Thy wrath has swept over me and Thy terrors have destroyed me.

      They surround me like water all the time: they assail me all together.

      Thou has taken from me friend and companion;

       Thy darkness is my intimate.”

And that is all.

     Yet at such a moment, and in such a Psalm, the soul, catching and comprehending in its own black mirror the fearful darkness of revelation, is confronted in its own depths with the countenance of the murdered Christ.  This is more than a meeting.  It is an identification.  We have entered into a Baptism of darkness in which we are one with His Death.  But to die with Christ is to rise with Him. He…understood…the darkness of life.  The tides of light that pours down upon the whole Church from the mountain top which is the soul of the Risen Savior, blind us by their intense purity and drown us in darkness….If the paradox may be allowed, this frightful death is our first taste of glory.

     Then we begin to discover that the night in which we seem to be lost is the protection of the shadow of God’s wings.  If God has brought us into this darkness it is because He wishes to guard us with extreme care and tenderness [the grace of space…Ps4], or, in the words of the Psalm “like the apple of His eye.”  The new life of the soul united in Christ in His Mystery is something too delicate and tender to be let loose in a crowd that may contain many enemies, and therefore God has isolated the soul in a soundless and vast interior solitude, the solitude of His own Heart where there is no human spectator and where the soul can no longer even see itself.  True, the depths of that solitude open and close in a flash: but the soul remains enveloped and penetrated with Divine Emptiness, saturated with the vastness of God, charged with the living voice of silence in which His Word is eternally uttered.

The protection of darkness and silence is extremely necessary for the soul that begins to burn with these touches of the Spirit of God.  …We need that protection, and more and more we sense our need.  For the devils too, understand our position.  They stand to profit if they can destroy and exhaust us with false lights and raptures of their own devising.  This is the stage when the soul that is too tough for its own good, too well able to stand the overpowering sweetness of half natural ecstasies, will be in danger of entering the ways of false mysticism.

Prayer will become debauchery, the Liturgy a riot of prophecy and carnal exaltation.  The mark of this falsity is violence.  It is sealed with the seal of contention and brutality and strain.  These are the spiritual footprints of the devil who, if he cannot deceive the soul with false raptures, soon tears off his mask and lets loose against us a jungle full of terrors and we live in the nightmare on the threshold of the deepest darkness that alone can save us.

In this tribulation the Lord God is ever with us, no matter how much we fear.  Cum ips sum in tribulatione.  These are the words from Psalm 90 which are chanted every night in the monastic Compline when the shadows fall upon the cloister and the monks are ending their day of prayer.  “I will be with him in trouble, I will rescue him and honor him.”  The angels are at our side, holding us up lest we should dash our foot against a stone.  We could not travel through the forest that the spiritual life has now become, unless His power carried us onward, where we tread upon the asp and basilisk and never feel their sting, and never suffer harm!  Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum.  We have made the Most High God our refuge.  The scourge will never touch us.  Bread in the Wilderness

3.  Climbing the High Mountains: Come up higher and go deeper..through Mercy

What are the horizons that lie ahead, in the ascent to the City of God in heaven?  There are high peaks before us now, serene with snow and light, above the level of tempest.  They are far away.  We almost never see them they are so high.  But we lift up our eyes toward them, for there the saints dwell:  and these are the mountains of holiness whence cometh our help.

Levari oculos meos in montes unde veniet auxilium mihi.

                    Ascending the Mountain of Love: Our Avodas Hashem

IConfronting the Abyss of Limitation

God is Love. She could say:

"I contemplate and adore the other divine perfections ... through Mercy. All of these perfections appear to be resplendent with Love." There was nothing but this in God.

The searching went on in darkness. Thérèse only explained what she had to explain, either for the novices or when asked to write the story of her life later. Habitually she lived in the dark. We might say that she found herself bogged down in what is often called the purification of the spirit. This consists far less in keen sufferings marked by distinct stages - some of these there were indeed deep sufferings - than in a muddled fog or kind of quicksand in which one becomes enmired and unable to move." This trial continued in anguish, but with upward thrusts toward God and convictions that she had found him. There was an apparent contradiction between her progressive discovery of sin and of sinful tendencies in herself and others, and her discovery of God.

The God whom Thérèse discovered was the God of Love. At the same time she saw that around her, and even in her Carmel, God was not known. The God who is Love was not known! They knew the God of justice, quid pro quo, and they tried to acquire merits. But, thought Thérèse, this was not the way to win him. God is Love, God is Mercy. But what is Mercy? It is the Love of God which gives itself beyond all demands and rights.

4. The Roots of the Cross

*LXXXIX*: Wisdom of the Desert

“Abess Syncletica of holy memory said: ‘There is labour and great struggle for the impious who are converted to God.  But after that comes inexpressible joy.  A man who wants to light a fire first is plagued by smoke, and the smoke drives him to tears, yet finally he gets the fire that he wants.  So also it is written: “Our God is a consuming fire. “  Hence we ought to light the divine fire in ourselves with labour and with tears.’ “

The full text reads (Ex 8:16 among others," ...ko amar Hashem shalach ami veya'avduni-...thus saith the L*rd, let my people go (so that/and) they shall serve me."  from Va'eira; the stench of the frog heap

From A Tree Sprung

Oh Human Imperfection
About halfway through the excellent The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O'Connor's Spiritual Journey, I have discovered with pleasure that Flannery O'Connor put her finger on a specific moment of influence. O'Connor had agreed to edit and write the introduction for a book about a terribly deformed little girl (Mary Ann) who nonetheless lived a life of joy, written by an Atlanta chapter of the order who approached her. There is much food for thought in "The Abbess" about the role of "innocent suffering" in the life of the Christian and the life of the Church, prompted by O'Connor's own thoughts and writings while working on the book. In considering the Hawthorne connection, which I find interesting for all the threads I see converging as well as for the reminder that we often do not realize the good we are doing, I include this excerpt:

It is true that Mary Ann suffered, but Flannery did not believe she suffered in vain. Rather her suffering was a thread woven within the larger fabric of believers called the Communion of Saints. In the introduction, Flannery described the Communion of Saints as "the action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead."
On May 14, 1961, she explained to a friend that "the living and the dead" referred to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was her inspiration for the introduction. Long before Mary Ann was born, Hawthorne had written about visiting the children's ward in a Liverpool workhouse. There, according to his description, he met a "wretched, pale, half-torpid child of indeterminate sex, about six years old." Hawthorne admitted that he found the child repulsive, but for some mysterious reason, the child took a liking to him. The child insisted that Hawthorne pick him up. Despite his aversion, Hawthorne did what the child wanted: I should never have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances."
According to Flannery, Mother Alphonsa believed that these were the greatest words her father ever wrote. And many years after Mother Alphonsa had died, Flannery perceived a mystical connection existing between Hawthorne's picking up the child, his daughter working among the dying and the sisters caring for a little girl with a disfigured face.

There is a direct line between the incident in the Liverpool workhouse, the work of Hawthorne's daughter, and Mary Ann -- who stands not only for herself but for all the other examples of human imperfection and grotesquerie which the Sisters of Rose Hawthorne's order spend their lives caring for. Their work is the tree sprung from Hawthorne's small act of Christlikeness and Mary Ann its flower.

Flannery O'Connor dedicated the book to the memory of Nathaniel Hawthorne.