Let the beauty you love be what you do.
- Entering through suffering
Slightly edited from an email to my friend Ken today:
“I’m glad you liked [my writings].
You know, I used to talk to one of the priests at [a church in Lower Manhattan] for a while, right after I entered the Church and I was going to daily Mass there all the time. He was a guy with some philosophy background. I sent him some of those writings, because he was interested in my conversion. I sent him That which is impossible…, What happened, and Transparent.
I was so surprised by his reaction to them. He found them to be so full of pain and suffering, and he didn’t really see what relevance they had to my eventually entering the Church. For me, when I re-read that stuff, it seems totally infused with joy. It’s odd, thinking about what different people see in writings like that… I know my own reaction to writings on this topic has changed a lot with experience.
Maybe this also has something to do with why I feel such a kinship with Simone Weil. I think there are many paths, many doors to understanding. One of them is through suffering. This is, of course, the one that Christ illuminates so well. It’s the path Simone took (and why she was so attracted to Christianity, I’m sure). It’s the path I took . . . but it’s not the one everyone takes. There are many people, even people with considerable spiritual insight, who don’t see beauty in suffering at all.”
Meanwhile, Mitsu quotes Simone on evil, in relation to the current situation in Iran; a Flannery O’Connor fan-blog quotes Flannery on Simone; my friend Suzanne from Corpus Christi finds a plaque on the front of her apartment building in Morningside Heights saying that Simone lived there in 1942; and Bill keeps reminding me that to draw attention to one’s own suffering is a form of vanity.
And then there is Faulkner:
“I know the answer to that and I know that I can’t change that answer and I don’t think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.” — The Wild Palms
- Less
Mitsu and I were discussing my previous post:
Mitsu: [Drummond] seems to think (and perhaps this is a Christian tendency in general, also observable in that passage [from 1 Corinthians]) that love is more than the sum of its parts, i.e., that it is its parts, plus. But, I don’t think it’s a sum of parts, even with more added, i.e., love isn’t kindness + … + (something).
Me: I know what you mean. It’s not addition; it’s subtraction. I wrote about that a while ago.
Mitsu: Yes, love is less than the sum of its parts, yet that’s what makes it greater.
Me: Right. I’ll post that.
- St. Paul
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long, and is kind;
Love envieth not;
Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly,
Seeketh not her own,
Is not easily provoked,
Thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity,
But rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things,
Hopeth all things,
Endureth all things.Love never faileth; but whether there be prophesies, they shall fail; whether there are tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, Love, these three: but the greatest of these is Love.”
– I. Cor. xiii
“Why is love greater than faith, because the end is greater than the means. What is the use of having faith? It is to connect the soul with God. And what is the object of connecting Man with God? That he may become like God. But God is Love. Hence faith, the means, is in order to Love, the end. Love, therefore, obviously is greater than faith. It is greater than charity, again, because the whole is greater than a part. Charity is only a little bit of Love, one of the innumerable avenues of Love, and there may even be, and there is, a great deal of charity without Love. It is a very easy thing to toss a copper to a beggar on the street; it is generally an easier thing than not to do it. Yet Love is just as often in the withholding. We purchase relief from the sympathetic feelings roused by the spectacle of misery, at the copper’s cost. It is too cheap — too cheap for us, and often too dear for the beggar. If we really loved him we would do more for him, or less (18-19).”
“Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day (25-26).”
“It is not hard to give up our rights. They are often external. The difficult thing is not to seek things for ourselves at all. After we have sought them, bought them, won them, deserved them, we have taken the cream off them for ourselves already. Little cross then is to give them up. But not to seek them, to look every man not at his own things, but on the things of others — id opus est. ‘Seekest thou great things for thyself?’ said the prophet; ‘seek them not.’ Why? Because there is no greatness in things. Things cannot be great. The only greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake . . . The most obvious lesson in Christ’s teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything, but only in giving (32-33).”
“[It] is perfectly certain — and you will not misunderstand me — that to enter Heaven a man must take it with him (38).”
“Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of . . . the Christlike nature in its fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless practice (44).”
“Above all, do not resent temptation; do not be perplexed because it seems to thicken round you more and more, and ceases neither for agony nor prayer. That is your practice . . . Do not grudge the hand that is molding the still too shapeless image within you. It is growing more beautiful though you see it not, and every touch of temptation may add to its perfection. Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men, and among things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles. You remember Geothe’s words: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Doch ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt. ‘Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of life.’ (45-46)”
“To make it easier, I have named some of the elements of love. But these are only elements. Love itself can never be defined. Light is something more than the sum of its ingredients — a glowing, dazzling, tremendous ether. And love is something more than all its elements — a palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living, thing. By synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness, they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make love (46-47).”
– Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World
- Mary Robison
“Sex, at my place, in silence, and under a sheet.
Not silence. I can still hear muffled car honks and brakes and tires, the next door neighbor’s cat, and laughter now from some huddle of men, a National Guard helicopter going over, the air fan, the plumbing’s rumble, the bed when we move, a child somewhere having a dream, the high whine of the streetcar, the little voice of a neighbor’s television, freighter horns on the Mississippi, now Saunder’s long breathing against my chest as he’s slipping off into sleep.”
– One D. O. A., One on the Way [189]
- Virginia Woolf
On making art:
“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in her hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge or tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as down any dark passage for a child (22).”
On communication in marriage:
“She never could say what she felt… He was watching her. She knew what he was thinking. You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful… She began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him…
‘Yes, you were right’… And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: Yet he knew.”– To the Lighthouse
- Latin
For me, a breakthrough in reading Latin came when I let go of the idea that I needed to know the meaning of each word before I could analyze the structure of the sentence. It is much more helpful to start from the grammar, then tackle the vocabulary.
Compared to learning a modern language, learning Latin is strange. At my school, there was an entire year (two semesters) in which we went over nearly every aspect of the grammar, four days a week. It was much more complete and clear than the grammar lessons I’ve gotten in French or Spanish or English classes I’ve taken, in which the focus was largely on conversation rather than translation. There are fewer exceptions to the grammatical rules in an older language. The sentences we read for this entire time were all constructed out of the vocabulary lists we were given at the beginning of each chapter in the grammar book we used, so we very rarely encountered words we didn’t know, and we certainly didn’t encounter the anything particularly challenging.
After this, instead of taking a step up to reading, say, something on the order of a newspaper or magazine article, as you might in a modern language class, we went straight to the speeches of Cicero, and then the poetry of Vergil. I could be wrong, but I think this must be something like handing a second year Spanish student One Hundred Years of Solitude.
It wasn’t until my fourth semester (Vergil) that I had a professor who really emphasized learning how to learn, and even then it took me several weeks of stubbornly clinging to the bad habits I’d picked up by simply memorizing English translations of Cicero before class the semester before, and being terrified when we were asked to translate passages of the Aeneid at sight in front of everyone, before I finally gave up on my old way (which had been perfectly effective in getting A’s in the Cicero class) and tried what my teacher was suggesting. It was incredibly hard, resisting the urge to reach for a dictionary or an English translation even long enough to parse the grammar of one complicated Latin sentence. It required me to actively work with something I didn’t totally understand, which felt awkward and weird. Fortunately, it made such an immediate difference in the speed and fluency of my translation that I stuck with it, and now I’m much better off for it.
I find that one of the biggest obstacles I have in learning anything is thinking that I should already know it from the start. There’s actually no way to avoid the stage where you don’t know. Everything seems impossible right up until the moment when you figure it out and it seems obvious. This is all fine when you feel like you’re a beginner and you ought to be clueless, that making mistakes and having a hard time is just fine, but the second you start feeling like you ought to understand by now, that you’re supposed to know what you’re doing already, it’s almost unbearable, and giving up becomes a very attractive option.
An even worse problem is thinking that I do already know. I can actually witness myself stop listening to something someone’s trying to tell me when I realize I’ve heard them say it all before. The more I think I know about a topic, the harder it is to be open to new ways of learning and knowing about it. There can be great value in hearing something I’ve heard before again. Afterall, the situation has changed, there is always the possibility to arrive at some insight I didn’t have before. This has happened in my life many, many times… Reading a book again can be completely different than reading it the first time. The opportunity is utterly lost by thinking you’ve already understood everything.
So, how to approach every moment freshly, as if it is the first and only moment? How to drop the assumptions about what I already know, what I can and can’t do, etc?
- Practice
I just got back from a week in a monastery.
Two things I noticed/re-noticed about practice:
1. Practice is not for making yourself better.
2. Practice is not for seeing visions. If things are seen, you are not the one seeing them.
- Dreams
Recently I’ve had several dreams where I’m in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation with someone, realize I’m dreaming, realize that if I’m dreaming that means I must know the other person’s part of the conversation because I’m the one dreaming it, and realize I don’t actually know the other person’s part because I’ve never learned the information being said.
What I remember the next day isn’t anything about the contents of the conversation, only the experience of waking up in the dream and reasoning out that there is no possible way I could know what the other person is saying even though I’m dreaming. In the dream I also know that I’m doing it again.
- Serenity
(Excerpts from a 12-page story, edited for years, unpublished.)
On the night of the accident, the couple next door was at it again. Jimmy pressed his face against the attic window, his nose smooshed up. He looked down over the row of azalea bushes in the grassy side-yard. He squinted at the couple’s house, on the other side. Nothing to see. The curtains were drawn tight and heavy, just like they always were. Jimmy was sitting up on his knees in the windowseat, and he could feel it in his knees, and his thighs were jittery and his hands were jittery. He framed his temples against the warm glass pane, as if he were blocking some glare to see better, only there was no glare to block. It was dark, inside and out. The two houses separated by the azaleas were set back from Grady. The streetlight was three houses down and its light was filtered by trees. The fireflies specked the shadow-bushes like the thumped ashes of invisible cigarettes.
They were really at it over there.
. . .
That afternoon, when he had climbed down the stairs they’d all been there, standing in the kitchen doorway whispering and hissing about the Lord and His comforting arms. Mary Sue blew her nose in one of Bobbie’s good dinner napkins and, in the midst of a chorus of bless yous, they all turned to stare at Jimmy, who still had pink sheet-marks stretching down the side of his face and sleepers in his eyes. Jimmy’s uncle Samuel, who was Mary Sue’s husband, and two cousins, also from their side, were with her. Jimmy had hardly seen the cousins since he was too young to remember, but they were standing there in their neckties, scowling at him like he had no right.
“Merciful heavens,” whimpered Mary Sue as she looked up from the linen at her wiry nephew in his striped pajama britches.
“Ain’t it gaining on two?” one of the cousins asked the other as he looked at his wristwatch.
“Awful late in the day,” said Uncle Samuel, “for folks to be walking around half-naked, unshaven, looking like a punk.”
