Moving On

I think it is time for me to move on from this blog.

I will continue here: http://meinstreit.blogspot.com/

I first returned to Catholicism at age nineteen, after spending a few weeks in Europe. The first thing that had struck me about the sublimity of its churches, the poetic suggestions of the play of light and shadow, candle flame and statue, was that these things were mine. I didn’t have to spend my time looking to India or the East to find a culture thoroughly impressed by the longing of the human spirit for the ethereal Light. The fantastical, the magical, the superstitious, the expressions of anguish and hope that aggregate around the dissatisfactions with this world and the desire for bringing it with us into its source in “the beyond”- all this was here, in the tradition and beneath the culture that I had been born into. I started to see what had long been familiar with new eyes. As an early student of religion, quite taken in awe by the colourfulness and richness of the world’s traditions, the blandness, rationalism and secularity of the Western churches seemed weak and uninspired in comparison. They had abandoned imagination, they had forgone the cosmic longing, it seemed, and hung their tradition on the jousting poles of some political creed or another.

But when I went home and looked at the crucifixes in the houses, or the white bone Pieta statue in the living room, or the Rosary from my Oma, I realized it was not so simple. I remembered my childhood, and how naturally and enthusiastically the feeling of piety arose in me whenever it appeared that we were doing something “holy”, and how that urge to be in the sphere of the sublime characterized my earliest conceptions of myself, and how it remained the fundamental motivation of my seeking even when I first left Christianity, and spilled over into a thirst for art.

Now I can see that this longing has been with me at every stage along the way, and it is this longing that is constantly transfiguring the world inside my mind. It is the desire that makes me stop and pause when passing by the pine trees and grape vines or overlooking the valley. It is the longing that turns those same items of nature into figures or letters of a kind of mysterious language that I feel I am just learning. Like pouring over a complicated German text and recognizing this or that word, making out a piece of the paragraph here or there. Rocks start to appear like the calcification of very great thoughts, tree trunks like old men, bare branches as a vain if confident reaching out towards the sky.


Now summer has passed,
As if it had never been.
It is warm in the sun.
But this isn't enough.

All that might have been,
Like a five-corned leaf
Fell right into my hands,
But this isn't enough.

Neither evil nor good
Had vanished in vain,
It all burnt with white light,
But this isn't enough.

Life took me under its wing,
Preserved and protected,
Indeed I have been lucky.
But this isn't enough.

Not a leaf had been scorched,
Not a branch broken off…
The day wiped clean as clear glass.
But this isn't enough.

Arseny Tarkovsky (Translated by Maria Pearse)

I think this is, for me, “spirituality”. And traditional religion was (among many things) a very sophisticated and shared expression- diffusive and even substantive to culture- of the play between dissatisfaction and impossible aspiration. To the extent that the majority of people appeared to share in this, it was capable of being infused with a great deal of intellectual speculation and providing a type of catharsis for “the many” that was otherwise commensurate with (or not out right hostile to) the ordinary workings and goals of society at large. This no longer appears to be the case and is the central dilemma for the Church today.

What has always attracted me to Catholicism, particularly Catholicism of the old variety, is not its dogmatic or intellectual superstructure. Rather, it is the particular form it has been able to give to the longings of the masses of people. There is nothing quite like climbing the Santa Scala on one’s knees, in my opinion, step by step towards a fresco of the Crucified Lord, or coming together with a group of strangers who all know how to follow the count of Rosary beads, no matter the language being spoken. It was highly interesting to see Tosca last weekend and see a portrayal wherein Catholicism could lends itself to the background of an imaginary shared between the rich and the poor, the passionate, the pure, the wicked, and even those doubtful of the Church. This is now only a memory for many and soon to be only fantasy for most.

I suppose the point of this post is that I’ve never had “faith” in the way the Church and its spokespersons expect it from me, and I may never. This “new phase” for me is probably just an acknowledgement of what has always been the case.

As St. Thomas says, “a heretic with regard to one article has no faith in the other articles, but only a kind of opinion in accordance with his own will."

I readily admit that I don’t know what faith is, nor am I really interested in discussing it any longer. Personally, I see faith all around me in the day to day living of people of every creed and none, in the basic will to live and in every effort to be good and selfless in the face of day’s darkness.

What I do know is that what began as a spirituality built on childhood memory, filial piety and the sacramentality of agrarian nature has, with no little co-operation of the Church’s divisive rhetoric, become a dreadful Thing obsessed with the fear of the loss of meaning in life, and therefore joy. I must therefore remove myself from the terms of this discussion. I, like many, feel a malaise in what is called “modern life”, but when one finds oneself reading articles and blog posts at 3’oclock in the morning trying to figure out whether late Medieval nominalism really is the source of all the epistemological woes that render faith a de facto impossibility for many, I feel there is something wrong. Not wrong in the sense of the intellectual pursuit, but in the sense of hanging the salvation of souls on it and all the anxiety that breeds. If it is true, as Joseph Ratzinger wrote, that “Christianity has a decisive connection to the motivational forces of the modern age”, if it is true, as is becoming fashionable to argue, that modernity is the theological step child (some would say Frankenstein) of the Christian world, it might also be true that modernity is something Christianity has to confront and accept as a kind of inconvenient revelation of itself. Much in the same way a father, though seeing himself in his son, must accept the son fulfills the father’s image precisely in taking his own path in life, with all of its own logic. I don’t know.

FAITH IS, AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME, ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY AND ALTOGETHER IMPOSSIBLE
- Stanislaw Lem

This paradox ultimately sums up where I find myself and perhaps have always been. I am going to continue, with whatever faith it is I do have- a trust in the longing of the soul- and I will push the Church’s rhetoric and every implicit call for battle with the world aside. The battle is, as always, in myself. Christ is still God for me: the icon and image of what life and love must really mean, and the good. Julian of Norwich writes:

".....I saw that he is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand."

My new blog will continue with some of these themes. I will try to be less whiny and less full of angst and anxiety. Most of all, I hope it will just be continued reflections on life, on seeking, on image, symbol, spirit, poetry and art. It is still Christ on my lips when I go to sleep. You can decide what that means for me here or in the hereafter.