{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
Great architectural forms like cathedrals and mosques, precarious Himalayan monasteries, standing stonehenges, inviting amphitheaters, and pyramids all reveal longings in the human soul, the ways it loves to express itself and simply be, under open sky, near a river, against a cliff. … architectures speak of the joy the soul is here for.
Coleman Barks, in Rumi, Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart
At the beginning of Lent I decided to subscribe to the Lent Daily Reflections by the World Community for Christian Meditation. I am glad that I did, because they have contained many inspiring thoughts alongside some gentle, wholesome counsel.
Today’s reflection (Friday of Lent Week 4) talks about the anguish of loss, making the helpful distinction between two types of losses. One is described as the deliverance from an addiction or a compulsive delusion, which, while very much experienced as a loss at the time, in the end leads to freedom and a life lived with renewed vigour. The second type, on the other hand, is a ‘genuine death experience that drags us into a vortex of surrendering to something vaster than we can control’.
Experience of the second type, which they describe as ‘major surgery with a strong anaesthetic that puts us out’, can take a long time to heal and integrate and can change your life forever. It probably will!
Anne Carson’s essay, ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’ (in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera), offers some intriguing thoughts on love, the self, God etc., while at the same time engaging in interesting ways with the three women mentioned in the title. She quotes Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace) as saying:
God gave me Being in order that I should give it back to him. … God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.
Having read Weil’s Waiting for God a little while ago, I am quite tempted to add Gravity and Grace to my burgeoning reading list as well.
Carson also quotes Marguerite Porete, who says of God that ‘His Farness is the more Near’. Carson comments:
I have no idea what this sentence means but it gives me a thrill. It fills me with wonder. In itself the sentence is a small complete act of worship, like a hymn or a prayer.
Porete’s phrase captures the tension of divine transcendence and immanence well, but I also love the way Carson expresses her fascination with it. On the same theme she once again quotes Weil, who remarks that ‘God can only be present in creation under the form of absence’.
Here, finally, is another Porete quote, this time expressing her apophatic theology:
For everything that one can tell of God or write, no less than what one can think, of God who is more than words, is as much lying as it is telling the truth.
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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
Thus Anne Carson, in ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’ (published in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera)
Hope is not logical, but a ‘participation in the very life of God’ (just like faith and love, which were called ‘theological virtues’ as opposed to virtues acquired by practice, temperament, or willpower). That doesn’t mean we should not practice being hopeful, but it is still not a matter of pure willpower. Faith, hope, and love are always somehow a gift – a cooperation with Someone Else, a participation in Something Larger than me.
The time is now, the forever now, for all of us to be engaged. To love fully, to be mindful, to care, to show up for this life.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘The New C-Word’
‘We either contemplate or we exploit.’ We either see things and persons with reverence and awe, and therefore treat them as genuinely other than ourselves; or we appropriate them, and manipulate them for our own purposes.
Thus Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 