Author: matt

Fog has a fascinating way of demarcating; revealing distance through gradated silhouettes; converting the world into an enormous pop-up book. Have you ever noticed that? Generally speaking, novel conditions have a way of enforcing themselves on perspective—insisting we take notice of things previously undetected.

We’re in such a novel condition. Our whole world mostly is. The effects of this pandemic are expressing themselves in countless ways, and no one can definitely speak to the duration or true meaning of this time. Yet, as the condition’s name suggests, it is pandemic—of all people. Thus it is common.

For me, as with fog, this has brought into stark relief what we call dimensions: our relationship to space and time themselves. I’m going to try to write four posts, each tied to the dimensions of reality. These are mere reflections; a humble prompt for inspection. May they offer you something helpful, should you read them.

Dimension 0 | A Point

Technically speaking, a point is actually no place at all; a null set. It derives its value, its meaning, its space only insofar as it connects to other points. It is the dimension of zero. The dot in the i of Jeremy Bearimy.  There are two symbols for the null set: the slashed zero (Ø) and the empty “curly brackets” ({}). (Yes, I just put curly brackets into parenthetical brackets.) Within the zero dimension we are bracketed thus with curls.

I’ve already written a piece about the present elusiveness of meaning, but, as this moment protracts, this seems even more the case. Yes there is value or, one could say, “values” available. Kindness and patience retain value, reaching out to others within the digital landscape while remaining present to those within our newly-shrunk society, prayer and mindfulness, physical activity and meditation on Scripture, care for self; all these are values within the nebula. And no, this time has not dissolved ultimate meaning; not tossed God from His throne nor totaled the vehicle of Truth. It’s more like we simply cannot find the place on the map reading, “You Are Here.” This type of meaning evades what bible students call “the interpretation” and scientists term “conclusion.” It has the distinct feel of chasing after the wind; literally, “an attempt to herd wind.” “The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind…” (Ecc. 1:6)

This point in space is both a dimension and no dimension at all, which is to say it is a paradox—a mystery. I find that people range from tepid to cold when it comes to mystery. Mystery: a “mouth-shutting-ness.” Forrest Gump has up and stopped running, and we’re left shouting, “Now what are we supposed to do?!” The emphasis is certainly upon the word “now,” a strange track set on repeat.

Days all feel vaguely the same. If you live in Chicago, you have spring, winter, summer, and fall all in one week. We’ve lost track of all of the yearly rituals that have vaporized into the ether: Opening Day and March Madness, Spring Break trips and Proms, weddings and funerals, Holy Week. It is a point whose point escapes us. Tomorrow promises to be much the same. And it is disorienting, no two ways about it, as we discover ourselves scraping and searching for bearings, groping desperately in darkness. Don’t we perceive this pent up energy? Have you been wondering what it’s about?

In the null set we are getting far too much time with ourselves, aren’t we? You are the one self with whom social distancing is regrettably futile, and you’ve become too close for comfort! It was the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who portrayed hell as an eternity in which people are their own tormentors—left alone with the abrasion of their own relentless self-critiques—in his aptly titled play, No Exit. The alarming question appears early, “how shall I endure my own company?”

Doesn’t that question speak to a torment we are all presently enduring? One of the characters in Sartre’s play finds herself wondering when the tormentors will arrive, and the valet asks her how she would recognize one. Her answer? “They look frightened.” This amuses hell’s valet, “Of whom would they be afraid? Their victims?”

“Laugh away,” she replies, “but I know what I’m talking about. I’ve often watched my face in the glass.” This character, Inez, knows inherently that fear is at the center of all torment, and it is alluded that the victim and tormentor shall be one and the same. But why?

Journalist Judith Shulevitz addressed this in her 2003 New York Times Magazine essay, “Bring Back the Sabbath,” bemoaning our “machinery of self-censorship” and the arduousness of “stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.” Our activity, it would seem, performs an unacknowledged function; it is a noise machine to muffle this irritating murmur, whose droning has largely been eliminated without our consent. (In CS Lewis’s  The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape informs his demonic protégé Wormwood of hell’s intent, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth.” Yes they have.)

This condition is what theologians call “ontological lightness”—the perceived weightlessness of our self. As the late Brent Curtis put it, “the reality that when I stop ‘doing’ and simply listen to my heart, I am not anchored to anything substantive. I become aware that my very identity is synonymous with activity.” The discomfort, it turns out, is an existential crisis over which we skate precariously. The calls are coming from inside the house!

So we are all versions of Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly striving desperately against the disappearance of his world and very self. It is both terrifying and amusing. It is our corporate plot line. “As soon as they stop performing,” Curtis observes of our culture, “their identities—and ours—disappear.”

Are we the null set? God forbid! Constructed entirely of our doing? Or is there a self beneath it all; one with which we may be at rest, even apart from its productivity, even in naked stillness or newfound ineptitude in performing and producing? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve never stuck around long enough to find out. 

Faced with her own crisis of self, my friend Kendra penned a poem that is both deeply honest and deeply wise,

Would your dove ever descend on me and say you are well pleased?
I’m not even a son but a daughter, so the quote doesn’t even fit
You speak a foreign language when you say I’m loved apart from what I do
What clothes, skin, and bones do I have apart from my endeavors?

She continues later,

If you unraveled my performance you’d keep going going going
Is there a core it wraps around or simply the end of the string
If it’s just the string God don’t unravel it
I’ll exist no more

The poem ends with a gut-level plea that says so much,

Do you like these words? Will you put them in a book?
Good, then it was worth it. I don’t have to do the real work.
My heart can remain unchanged; just tell me, “wow your heart’s so real!”
Tell me, tell me, tell me so I do not have to feel.

Can the love and pleasure of God actually rest upon those whose ledger of merit reads zilch? Can there be a being with value beneath the yarn once it is all unspooled? Can we avoid having this conversation a little longer? Please? We discover in times like this just how much our lives are a mad scramble to cobble together our sense of self.

The one thing I know is that the “You” in “You Are Here” is precisely where the now has brought us; inescapably so. Are you coming to see how ontologically light you really are? Have you any answer your auto-torment—your own frightened face in the glass? If not, can you re-enter the world with anything but fear and renewed desperation? Or will the you who you are re-enter with greater rest and an enlarged capacity for generosity?

“You have made us for Yourself,” observed the great bishop of Hippo, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” The you who are here,  are made in the very image and likeness of the Creator, and, before a work hour was complete, were beheld to be “very good.” The Dove descended upon Jesus, and, before a single sermon or miracle, the Father’s voice pronounced love and great pleasure; the type of love that defines the object as beloved. And he became “a life-giving spirit.”

You are here.

And, to quote my friend’s poem, “the real work” is before you; to name your noise and restlessness; to claim your silent rest—or at least a taste of it!

Wendell Berry spoke so simply and so poignantly about this “real work” in his poem “Our Real Work”:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

In his Noise-lauding letter, Screwtape quotes George MacDonald’s “sickening” description of heaven, “the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.”

“You Are Here,” and here you may remain until the you who is here comes to rest with your self, as defined apart from all of its noise and accolades; to rest in the goodness of your being and belovedness. The “Where” of “You Are Here” may only disclose itself by way of this real work, and although it may remain murky, you will be allowed to orient yourself by the unfamiliar sounds of music and singing—issuing from within, of all places!

As this happens, you will actually have something new to offer; something to give. And you will say along with another poet, Walt Whitman, “When I give I give myself.”

 

Our world has been flung into a peculiar quiet, and we know not what to make of it.  Life within ‘The Great Pause’ finds us confronted by our craving for noise. More truthfully, we are coming to see how all the noise of our hustling and bustling serves to drown out the clamor within. As we’ve learned from the movies, “it’s quiet—too quiet!”

Streets without traffic, gridlocked minds; public venues stilled, private venues cacophonous; bodies idle yet pent up. There is no telling when this infernal quietness might end. Whoever said silence was golden? It isn’t! Silence is foreboding, if anything. Even monks don’t like the stuff. They spend their whole lives “acquiring the taste.”

During my undergrad I memorized a lot of Scripture. I was part of a group that heavily emphasized it and have never regretted the storehouse it has been for me. During one study group, we agreed to memorize John 14:6 and Luke 6:46. Of course someone got it wrong and committed Luke 14:6 to memory: “And they had nothing to say.” We laughed about this and, naturally, all agreed to memorize this verse as well.

We do have nothing to say. Our politicians and pundits and so-called ‘talking heads’ have seldom been so flummoxed. Even the wise in markets and theology and psychology and science are at a veritable loss. I know I am, middling though my wisdom be. O but we want to say or hear something—anything!

In actuality, it isn’t as though we have nothing to say. There is some good stuff being said; and a lot of rubbish also. But there is saying and there is saying. It’s the second one that is in scarce supply at present—like toilet paper and rubbing alcohol.

I’m fond of a vignette that is found toward the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus has invited his three close companions John, James and Peter on a hike to the summit of an arid mountain in northern Galilee. Atop the peak, Jesus suddenly begins radiating light like a sun. Even his clothes became white as light—as Mark put it, “whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.” He was transfigured; the Greek word is metamorphoō; altered from one state to another; something humanly familiar became something altogether apart. Some might say holy. Certainly dazzling.

Moses and Elijah showed up too! The three of them had a conversation about his impending “departure.” And Jesus’ three fellow hikers were gobsmacked. Speechless. Or nearly.

True to form, Peter opines, “Lord, it is good that we are here.” And he has a recommendation, “If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” Luke offers us readers a parenthetical: “(He did not know what he was saying.)” Peter was saying something but he was not saying anything.

Without warning, and while Peter was in mid-saying, “a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.'” Isn’t that just perfect? Something marvelous and ineffable was happening, but Peter’s incurable instinct was to speak—surely something must be said or done or? Peter, you don’t need to say anything or do anything—save listen.

I was on a walk with my dog the other morning, and I found myself asking God to teach me to pray. I just haven’t felt like I’ve had the right words for a while now; nor the right heart; nor mind. I walked and walked. My dog looked for squirrels and smelled the bases of trees and lamp posts and poked her nose into shrubbery. Soon I was nearing my home, and the walk was nearly complete. I had blown it! Thirty minutes of disjointed thinking and still none of the right words at all.

Nearing an intersection, I realized that I had not even been consciously in the presence of God. And I found myself saying, “God, help me learn to enter your presence.”

Maybe I hadn’t blown it. Maybe he was teaching me to pray.

The writer of Ecclesiastes offers counsel for entering the presence of God: “let your words be few.” But he says more: “draw near to listen.” God doesn’t begrudge our talking so much as our lack of listening. He has something to say. I think I mostly keep talking because I don’t totally believe this, and the roaring on the inside and out leave me so afraid.

Silence is that terrible and titular prowling monster of Shūsaku Endõ’s novel, “the stillness of the night” which forces us, as it forced Rodrigues, to rightly name both the agony of groaning beyond our doors as well as the abyss of questions gaping within us. A moment of truth. A stark one.

None of us asked for this. Who knew silence could be so disquieting? But the world around us is speaking volumes presently, and the world within us is speaking volumes as well. In the former case, I believe it was Rousseau who remarked that the thoughts of modern man had become so preoccupied as to make him incapable of discerning the cries of the needy on the streets outside his own home. With regard to the latter, Parker Palmer laments our aversion to self-listening. “We listen for guidance everywhere except from within,” he says. And he continues, “if I am  to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else.”

Only then, Palmer says, we can hear the “words that arise when the inner teacher feels safe enough to tell its truth.” God is offering ears to hear—as king David wrote, “you have dug for me an ear.” God is digging us ears right now, like it or not.

Our world has been thrust into a bright cloud of sorts—what one medieval mystic called “The Cloud of Unknowing”—and it is ours mostly to listen. What are the honest and uncomfortable questions yearning to be asked? How is our world making its deepest needs known? Is it possible that if we remain with such enigmas—patiently, curiously as those “drawing near to listen”—we may end up hearing something unexpected from the mouth of God? Only one way to find out. Shhhh. None of us like being shushed, but don’t we all need it from time to time?

Perhaps silence is golden, or, rather, a smelting by which something golden might be extracted from so much dross. Those damn monks are probably onto something!

In Jude’s epistle, we find a rather simple yet important injunction, “Have mercy on those who doubt.” (v. 22) This would remind us that doubt is an ongoing reality among the people of God, and that the people of God have but one best treatment: mercy.

Mercy is that otherworldly quality of God that moves kindly toward others in any and every form of difficulty without condemnation. It does not come asking for explanations, only an entry point for help—be that encouragement, prayer, mourning, or even one’s quiet presence. Mercy is curious and patient and humble and attentive. A rabbinic tradition names thirteen attributes of God’s mercy; among them are a mercy that averts human distress, and another a mercy for when the distress has already begun.

This is how doubt is handled. Continue reading “doubt”

 If there is one word which most of us would like to significantly reduce from our usage, it must be “like.” I used it twice in that opening sentence.

This word would relegate our lives to simile; serving as a membrane between our sensory and spiritual participation in a textured existence. It may reduce chaffing, but it also blunts our humanness. Our lives were never intended to be similes. It’s like we feel this each time we say like. (The word simile actually means similar, or like.)

Yet Advent presents us with the ineffable—that which cannot be worded. Its the prophets who got most dumbfounded: thrones like jasper, skin like blazing amber, lakes like crystal. Theologians call these beatific  or “blessed” visions—visio beatifica—and they inarticulate (v.) us all. Maybe we use like so much because we’ve forgotten how to be speechless?

Continue reading “Advent IV | Wonder”

Did you know that honeybees dance? They do, and their dance has a name: the waggle dance. But its the reason for their dance which makes this fact truly sublime.

When a worker returns to the hive from a successful pollen reconnaissance, she gathers an audience of other bees around her and does a conspicuous and choreographed series of spins and shakes. “Why?” you ask. The dance is a map. That’s right, this dance—the waggle dance—is the way bees tell one another where to find a bounty. This waggle dance is how bees preserve their colony. They dance for survival.

You might want to watch for yourself. Its so marvelous it may bring you to tears. (Having it narrated by David Attenborough never hurts.) This is the way joy works. It is a map disguised as a dance meant to direct others to bounty.

And the joy of Advent supremely so.

Continue reading “Advent III | Joy”

During elementary school I participated in a reading program that I quite enjoyed. One story has stuck with me all these years later. It brushes up against the topic of hope.

The fable involves a poor man surviving a night on a snowy mountaintop with only his worn peasant garb for warmth. In performing this act, he demonstrates his fortitude to the arrogant village rich man, who justifies his stinginess by attributing poverty to weakness. The rich man—assuming any who attempted such a bivouac would either die or falter—had promised a sizable portion of his wealth to any would-be survivor. Unbeknownst to him, the poor man’s friends had built a large bonfire on neighboring hillside. Though pummeled by the frigid winds, the man gazed intently upon its distant flicker, imagining its warmth to his body. And he survived.

When the poor man appears back in the village the following day, the rich man is incredulous. Upon learning the device of the friends, he declares the prize null—the poor man had violated the rules. Despite protests, the rich man refuses to honor his promise. “The sight of fire was sufficient,” he insists.

The friends again devise a scheme. After a religious fast, the entire village is gathered to a ceremonial feast in the town square. The feast is prepared while the celebrants wait—including the rich man. Scents of broiled meats, herbs, spices, and cakes flood the square. But no food is served. Eventually the rich man becomes impatient and demands the feast begin. He is notified that they would only be allowed to smell the food. Outraged, he rails that smelling can never take the place of eating. In this admission, he loses his prior cause and is forced to honor his promise to the poor man. 

The moral of the fable seems contradictory. Yearning either holds a power that is actual or illusory. In the same way, hope contradicts us thoroughly! Yet, nonetheless, Advent shamelessly invokes it. So we must decide if we will surrender ourselves into its contradictions.  Hope is, at the same time, sublime and ridiculous.

Continue reading “Advent II | Hope”