Beginning. Middle. End.

April 9th 2012

Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a great crowd (the humiliation of grace and favor). Imagine Thomas’s fingers trembling in the spear wound. Look at Peter’s discomfort (turning his head) at witnessing the scene, perhaps because of his own fear and trembling.

The painting in process is by Jack Baumgartner, a farmer-craftsman-artist in rural Kansas, who I think captures the mystery of that simultaneous fear and comfort that attends faith. I like the fact that this work is in process, much like faith always is, but I look forward to the painting’s completion as I anticipate the completion of the good work begun in me. Until then, my fingers tremble in the wounds.

Posted at 12:14pm and tagged with: Jack Baumgartner, st. Thomas, faith, Christ, Easter, doubt,.

Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a great crowd (the humiliation of grace and favor). Imagine Thomas’s fingers trembling in the spear wound. Look at Peter’s discomfort (turning his head) at witnessing the scene, perhaps because of his own fear and trembling.
The painting in process is by Jack Baumgartner, a farmer-craftsman-artist in rural Kansas, who I think captures the mystery of that simultaneous fear and comfort that attends faith. I like the fact that this work is in process, much like faith always is, but I look forward to the painting’s completion as I anticipate the completion of the good work begun in me. Until then, my fingers tremble in the wounds.

April 6th 2012

Horae Canonicae - Sext

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W.H. Auden

I

You need not see what someone is doingto know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,that eye-on-the-object look.

To ignore the appetitive goddesses,to desert the formidable shrines

of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana,to pray instead to St. Phocas,

St Barbara, San Saturnino,or whoever one’s patron is,

that one may be worthy of their mystery,what a prodigious step to have taken.

There should be monuments, there should be odes,to the nameless heroes who took it first,

to the first flaker of flintswho forgot his dinner,

the first collector of sea-shellsto remain celibate.

Where should we be but for them?Feral still, un-housetrained, still

wandering through forests withouta consonant to our names,

slaves of Dame Kind, lackingall notion of a city

and, at this noon, for this death,there would be no agents.

II

You need not hear what orders he is givingto know if someone has authority,

you have only to watch his mouth:when a besieging general sees

a city wall breached by his troops,when a bacteriologist

realizes in a flash what was wrongwith his hypothesis when,

from a glance at the jury, the prosecutorknows the defendant will hang,

their lips and the lines around themrelax, assuming an expression

not of simple pleasure at gettingtheir own sweet way but of satisfaction

at being right, an incarnationof Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous.

You may not like them much(Who does?) but we owe them

basilicas, divas,dictionaries, pastoral verse,

the courtesies of the city:without these judicial mouths

(which belong for the most partto very great scoundrels)

how squalid existence would be,tethered for life to some hut village,

afraid of the local snakeor the local ford demon

speaking the local patoisof some three hundred words

(think of the family squabbles and thepoison-pens, think of the inbreeding)

at this noon, there would be no authorityto command this death.

III

Anywhere you like, somewhereon broad-chested life-giving Earth,

anywhere between her thirstlandsand undrinkable Ocean,

the crowd stands perfectly still,its eyes (which seem one) and its mouths

(which seem infinitely many)expressionless, perfectly blank.

The crowd does not see (what everyone sees)a boxing match, a train wreck,

a battleship being launched,does not wonder (as everyone wonders)

who will win, what flag she will fly,how many will be burned alive,

is never distracted(as everyone is always distracted)

by a barking dog, a smell of fish,a mosquito on a bald head:

the crowd sees only one thing(which only the crowd can see)

an epiphany of thatwhich does whatever is done.

Whatever god a person believes in,in whatever way he believes,

(no two are exactly alike)as one of the crowd he believes

and only believes in thatin which there is only one way of believing.

Few people accept each other and mostwill never do anything properly,

but the crowd rejects no one, joining the crowdis the only thing all men can do.

Only because of that can we sayall men are our brothers,

superior, because of that,to the social exoskeletons: When

have they ever ignored their queens,for one second stopped work

on their provincial cities, to worshipThe Prince of this world like us,

at this noon, on this hill,in the occasion of this dying.

Posted at 1:40pm and tagged with: W.H. Auden, poetry, Good Friday, Christ, justice,.

April 6th 2012

Horae Canonicae - Terce

1 note |#

W.H. Auden

After shaking paws with his dog,
(Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind,)
The hangman sets off briskly over the heath;
He does not know yet who will be provided
To do the high works of Justice with:
Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom,
(Today she has one of her headaches)
With a sigh the judge descends his marble stair;
He does not know by what sentence
He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars:
And the poet, taking a breather
Round his garden before starting his eclogue,
Does not know whose Truth he will tell.

Sprites of hearth and store-room, godlings
Of professional mysteries, the Big Ones
Who can annihilate a city,
Cannot be bothered with this moment: we are left,
Each to his secret cult, now each of us
Prays to an image of his image of himself:
‘Let me get through this coming day
Without a dressing down from a superior,
Being worsted in a repartee,
Or behaving like an ass in front of the girls;
Let something exciting happen,
Let me find a lucky coin on a sidewalk.
Let me hear a new funny story.’

At this hour we all might be anyone:
It is only our victim who is without a wish
Who knows already (that is what
We can never forgive. If he knows the answers,
Then why are we here, why is there even dust?)
Knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,
That not one of us will slip up,
That the machinery of our world will function
Without a hitch, that today, for once,
There will be no squabbling on Mount Olympus,
No Chthonian mutters of unrest,
But no other miracle, knows that by sundown
We shall have had a good Friday.

Posted at 1:30pm and tagged with: one column, Good Friday, W.H. Auden, Christ, poetry, justice,.

April 6th 2012

Horae Canonicae - Prime

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W.H. Auden

Simultaneously, as soundlessly,
Spontaneously, suddenly
As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind
Gates of the body fly open
To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,
The horn gate and the ivory gate
Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously
Quell the nocturnal rummage
Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,
Ill-natured and second-rate,
Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned
By an historical mistake:
Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,
From absence to be on display,
Without a name or history I wake
Between my body and the day.

Holy this moment, wholly in the right,
As, in complete obedience
To the light’s laconic outcry, next
As a sheet, near as a wall,
Out there as a mountain’s poise of stone,
The world is present, about,
And I know that I am, here, not alone
But with a world and rejoice
Unvexed, for the will has still to claim
This adjacent arm as my own,
The memory to name me, resume
Its routine of praise and blame
And smiling to me is this instant while
Still the day is intact, and I
The Adam sinless in our beginning,
Adam still previous to any act.

I draw breath; this is of course to wish
No matter what, to be wise,
To be different, to die and the cost,
No matter how, is Paradise
Lost of course and myself owing a death:
The eager ridge, the steady sea,
The flat roofs of the fishing village
Still asleep in its bunny,
Though as fresh and sunny still are not friends
But things to hand, this ready flesh
No honest equal, but my accomplice now
My assassin to be, and my name
Stands for my historical share of care
For a lying self-made city,
Afraid of our living task, the dying
Which the coming day will ask.

Posted at 1:30pm and tagged with: Good Friday, W.H. Auden, Horae Canonicae, Holy Hours, Prayers, poetry, Christ, Justice, one column,.

January 12th 2012

Beauty & Justice

4 notes |#

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

– Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992.

***

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurels they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, - but the rest is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love -
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. I am not resigned.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Dirge without Music”. HarperCollins, 1958.

McCarthy’s “vision of a single flower” is a comic moment in the great tragedian’s world, as if the frailest example of beauty on a battlefield might account for the blood shed by nations. The sentence, a flower in itself, is the character’s yearning to justify the violence wrought by nature and man.

Millay on the other hand, doesn’t buy that there is enough beauty in the world to justify the loss of the beauty inherent in a person, especially those tender, kind, intelligent, witty, and brave souls who go quietly and gently into that good night.

Both McCarthy and Millay long for justice. And both figure beauty into the balance.

What type of beauty, were it found or cultivated, would make a person whole after a loss of this magnitude? Millay doesn’t think there is such a beauty, but she almost refuses to acknowledge the deficit, too. McCarthy’s corpus would probably suggest, “What does it matter? The impersonal world will go on long after we’re no longer able to behold and mark beauty. Enjoy beauty before you become indiscriminate dust.”

***

“I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set eternity in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”

- Ecclesiastes 3:10-11. King James Version, 1611.

The writer of Ecclesiastes sees something else: that beauty in itself is a kind of tragedy because of its time limit. In our beholding of beauty we already recognize its end, which creates a longing for eternity where beauty will not pass away. Maybe even a beauty where all our loss is restored to us, even if that loss, as McCarthy would say, came at our own hand.

How exacting is it then that God, in the form of a man who marked beauty – tender, kind, intelligent, witty, and brave Christ who went quietly and gently – died violently by the hands of men in the ultimate act of injustice, and He did so with the intent that our loss would be restored? How exacting and beautiful?

What work is God about from beginning to end?

Chauvet Cave, France. Horses. Circa 31,000 ago

Chauvet Cave Paintings in France. Circa 31,000 years ago.

Posted at 4:32pm and tagged with: Beauty, Chauvet Cave, Christ, Cormac McCarthy, Ecclesiastes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, one column, Aesthetic, justice,.