St.
Bernard says this of the faithful – represented by the Bride, the
Church, in his 21st sermon on the Song of Songs:
“[The Bride] requests…to be drawn, because ‘your righteousness is like the mountains of
God,” and she cannot attain to it of her own strength. She requests to be
drawn because she knows that no one comes to you unless your Father draws him.”
In our acts
of making, then, we do not celebrate our flesh in its natural gravity, to be
“stifled in the sea,” a natural gravity which in any case must be
overcome by the comic lightness of Christ; but it is the very comedy of our
flesh – struggling to gain God’s mountain through the arc that sources in Homer
as in Hopkins, and which Dante rendered explicit – that we get to work with our
tools and talents.
We
chronicle the hours and seasons that our Christ delivers us daily from our
demons. That’s the unique perspective, it seems, of the Christian
writer. Every moment an opportunity for grace; every season an opportunity to
represent, imitate, and in other ways render that grace palpable to the senses
– and our sense of humour...
... Even Shakespeare’s darkest comedy
retained a comic lightness – perhaps to keep bawdy humanity grounded
in the body that was God’s body too. Indeed, the writer’s
castigations and exorcisms can be dramatic and – as the swine’s fate at
Gerasene was meant at once to be terrible and hilarious – as risibly crude
or visibly glorious as our human conditions can dream up. One of the
consolations outside of Eden
Job,“Comedy in a handful of dust” at Korrektiv Press
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