to dust I will return

The picture to the left is a representation of the ninth station of the cross, depicting the third time Jesus fell on the way to Calvary. This rendering particularly strikes me. While praying through the stations this afternoon I was struck by this station in particular, as it was the first in which Jesus was completely prostrate on the ground . Jesus--mighty, powerful, holy, GOD!--lay crumbled, helpless and still in the hard dirt.

Who would have thought God's saving grace would look like this?





This past week I observed ("celebrated" isn't quite the appropriate word) Ash Wednesday for the second time. I began a day of surprising solemnity and introspection with a 6:30 am church service in the Episcopalian tradition. The liturgy was read, and--perhaps most meaningfully--communion was taken. We take communion weekly, so I expected it, but there is still something remarkably surreal and haunting about remembering Christ's death while being told that I am dust and to dust I will return. But that is what I am. I am but dust, a fleeting moment. Heidegger, in his Introduction to Metaphysics asks, "...what is a human lifespan amid millions of years? Barely a move of the secondhand, a breath. Within beings as a whole there is no justification to be found for emphasizing precisely this being that is called the human being and among which we ourselves happen to belong." Taking some creative interpretive liberties, I am quieted by this call to understand transience. I am a move of the secondhand, a breath. I cannot justify myself. I exist in a non-human construct, for I did not make myself.


Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm:

"Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

"Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?

Do you have an arm like God's,
and can your voice thunder like his?" (Job 40:6-9)


No. To all of the above, a roaring NO! I am but dust, and to dust I will return! As I walk--weakly, blindly, flailing--the forty days of Lent, the gruesome crucifixion (and glorious Easter!) always in view (though I see but through a veil fleetingly), my head is caught between hanging low in deserved shame and staring upwards in joyful hope.

Jesus, return to us soon! We pieces of dust have been blown around in the winds of sin and narcissism far too long.

the hands of the ancient artisan

Georges Rouault on his Landscape:


I have spent a fortnight now scrutinising the same horizon. As in former days when seeing travelling shows, or at fourteen in front of old stain-glass windows, forgetting everything and forgetting myself, I discovered this fundamental truth: a tree outlined against the sky has the same interest, character and the same expression as the human form. The question is how to express this: the difficulty begins there….I felt dwarfed by the task of rendering the colour of a grey wall turning to silver and the naked flesh coloured delightful tones according to the light. The taste of variation in tonality is a joy to the eye and to the mind, but it is also a monumental labour.

The good advisers among my friends said ‘You will soon tire of nature.’ On the contrary, should the obdurate visionary or the epic poet spend a thousand years examining it in diverse and various ways, it would always remain the promising source for new growth.

The ancient artisan loved his stone or his wood. And he worked with love. Anonymous hand of a grandiose work, was he not far superior to so many of the shallow personalities of our age?

In reality, what is beautiful remains hidden. And it has always been so. One must be worthy of searching for it and of persevering until death to find it. There will always be pain and anguish for whoever engages in this quest. But also profound and silent joy.

on "les fleurs du mal" and the best question ever

In late October I visited Boston College with a class in which I'm currently enrolled. The Jerusalem and Athens Forum is a great books program at Gordon College that seeks to bring together questioners and seekers of every sort and every age. We visited the art gallery at Boston for an exhibition, which was at the time running a showcase of works by Georges Rouault. Rouault is a curious artist to study; while many of his pieces are set to religious tones and carry redemptive themes, the art itself often seems desperate, in many places the paint reaching as much as an inch off the canvas, as if he was struggling to create as quickly as he was seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, his works bearing the brunt of his soul's weight, panic and seeking. In an obscure corner of the lower level I found a case in which had been placed several pieces of illustration--Roualt putting to paper what French writer and poet Charles Baudelaire had so gravely described in his much-chagrined "Les Fleurs du mal," a work unabashedly full of sin and pain and ugliness and eroticism--all things the common sense of decency has deferred to the shameful category of "unmentionables." But perhaps it is the ugliness and sin in our lives that makes them meaningful. WHY WHY WHY? Why is Aldous Huxley so darn right? Goodness only when there is sin, freedom only when there is real danger, God only when there is poetry.

I think the best question I've ever been asked was posed by dear old Mr. Smith--that man certainly knew his way around the seeker's psyche. While reading through Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," he asked what in this wide world makes me angry, makes me happy, makes me feel free, makes me feel so caged I could scream. What makes me feel like an old fish at the end of a thin piece of line? the fisher(wo)man reluctant to take pride in her catch once she's seen its eyes mirroring her own? Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow! What is it that makes me alive, for good or bad?

Is there some sinful thrill in desiring a life of tension, if it makes things seem more real? Of what am I afraid? Of unhappiness? Of feeling insignificant, useless, lost, lonely? Of not knowing how to repent, or for what TO repent? Of forgetting how to trust, to love, to hope?

I'd let the fish go for any of those reasons. For all of them.


Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.


(Baudelaire)

never would have come this way...

More and more I'm aware of the periphery, or, at least, aware that it is banal and faithless. Seeking, journeying, wondering, screaming--it all seems futile, until I'm reminded of Ecclesiastes 3:11, and the promise (hopeful? frightening?) that "[God] has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."
Grasping for the unreachable (and it may always be this way, I'm coming to understand) is thus given a greater context. This rotten, horrid, sinful shell of a girl has but one purpose, and the deep desire to fulfill this purpose carries with it a necessary leaving behind, a forgetting of duty, obligation, utilitarian expectations.

Lord, may I only seek after You, after whatever little pieces you offer. I'll take any of the crumbs You condescend to wipe off Your table. They are never wholly satisfying, but perhaps this is what You've intended all along. May I never cease my seeking. May I live--truly live--here, but never find this mortal world quite enough. Oh, Deus Absconditus, part the veil but a little bit more!


We made it to a strange town
Going down the wrong road
Like any story retold
Couldn't find a common ending
We're way gone, be gone, looking for our own way

We needed a distraction
You said you were redemption

We knew it as a wrong turn
We couldn't know the things we'd gain
When we reach the other border
We look out way down past the road we came from

We're looking at redemption
It was hidden in the landscape
Of loss and love and fire and rain
Never would come this way
Looking for redemption

We were looking out past the road we came from

Looking at redemption
Hidden in the landscape
Of loss and love and fire and rain
Never would have come this way
Looking for redemption
In the eyes of sorrow, eyes of rage
What a sordid histories they played
The drama of redemption
Redemption

-Jars of Clay

Trismegistus

O Egypt, Egypt—so the great lament
Of thrice-great Hermes went—
Nothing of thy religion shall remain
Save fables, which thy children shall disdain.
His grieving eye foresaw
The world’s bright fabric overthrown
Which married star to stone
And charged all things with awe.
And what, in that dismantled world, could be
More fabulous than he?
Had he existed? Was he but a name
Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim
Of every ancient quack—
That one could from a smoky cell
By talisman or spell
Coerce the Zodiac?
Still, still we summon him at midnight hour
To Milton’s pensive tower,
And hear him tell again how, then and now,
Creation is a house of mirrors, how
Each herb that sips the dew
Dazzles the eye with many small
Reflections of the All—
Which, after all, is true.

-Richard Wilbur

and it was not void

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion