Tuesday, September 29, 2009

third way

Avē atque valē.
-- Catullus, “Multas per gentes

Hail and farewell. The poet came home, across many nations and seas, to the funeral of his brother, speaking in vain to silent ashes.

I never met Forrest Church. I didn’t go to hear him preach. I read only one of his books. But he cast a long shadow.

Hello and good-bye. I can’t claim a personal grief for him. But he leaves a blank space.

* * * * *

A graceful traveler of our difficult but exemplary Third Way, he described more clearly than anyone else the spiritual journey of those who gag on words of theology. He said, “Religion is our human response to being alive and having to die.” He got it about right. We all know, though we keep forgetting it, that we have to die. It’s how we respond to the knowledge that makes the difference.

Yes, even Christians know they have to die. The Christian miracle is not that Jesus survived somehow, but that he actually died and then triumphed over death. To deny this is, as the church fathers say, a heresy. Docetism, the doctrine that Jesus only seemed to die, is forbidden to the faithful; for if Jesus did not die then he was never truly mortal, never was one of us, and the Word was not Made Flesh.

The image of Resurrection brings transcendence to the imminent, eternity to the temporal. It says, I will die but return in triumph, I shall go out with tears but come in again with shouts of joy. My destiny is greater than the destiny of this carcass, and I must behave accordingly. It is one, but only one, of the forms by which one may consecrate, or sacre, the world.

And there are those who say we shall live, have lived, many lives already. They say, My conduct in this life determines my next placement. So I must live as though I would suffer the pain I inflict, would enjoy the pleasure I give – for indeed they will come back to me. The image of Reincarnation also makes us accountable to a standard of eternity.

But most Unitarian Universalists (and many Christians under their breath) can’t follow the maps of theologians, and cannot see into eternity. They look straight at the vanishing world and find transcendence in the vanishing. This is not a rehearsal it’s the show, and others are watching, maybe in the back row God. You never saw the script, you don’t know who’s about to enter or where the trap doors are, but you’d better make it mean something, because, well – because that’s all, folks. To stand in the spotlight and know your act isnt worth the price of admission: that’s dying, ask any comedian. So you have to carry on under the eyes of God, as if it were immortal, which is to say in faith; and the Seeming that is never contradicted is all the Being and the Life there is.

Thoreau said he went to the woods “because I wished to live deliberately,” so that he would “not, when it came to die, discover that I had not lived.” If you have lived, he thought, then death cannot cheat you. You die for what you have lived for and, as Forrest said, “the purpose of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.

He also said, “If you’re reconciled to your life, you can reconcile with your death, and he had done so. I’ve seen how people die and most of the time it’s not like in the movies. I know that he was fortunate. He was not disfigured or disabled. He did not lose his voice or his thoughts. During a reprieve of several years he gave several last sermons.

He was fortunate but made the most of his good fortune. He seemed to be saying, and not just for a moment, I can die now. He showed us a way to live, knowing that he had to die. O grave, where is thy victory?

Brother Forrest, I never knew you but I feel the loss. I hear you now, though you are silent. In perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē. Hello and good-bye. You made me proud.


I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the phrase “post a comment.”

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

shadow plays

Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
Look! It is there!
-- Archibald MacLeish*

On late summer afternoons the low sun forces its way through foliage to my window, printing a pattern of framed branches and stems, leaves and gems of light, on the opposite wall. Just a little breeze is all it takes, a tremor in the woods, to make these shadows boil. As they thrash and spiral, small but fervently projected suns flash and burst among them. Isolated from the sound of wind and bound within their box, the shadows seem more violent than the things that cast them.

This is what in the theatre we call subtext. Nothing going on, but colossal conflicts written on the stillness.

As you read subtext, you learn what it was like to be there. I’m here right now, doing nothing much, and yet my mere existence is an impossible precipitate of cosmic force, and I read that force in the turbulence of shadows. Some would say that I am watching as God sustains me, others that I am looking through cracks into the warfare of my soul. I am indifferent to the difference.

On the wall of our dining room hang two family portraits, painted photographs of a grandfather’s parents. Stiff in their chairs, they speak of tradition, and they compliment the colors of the room. We remember their names; our children perhaps shall not. We do not know the turbulence of their spirits, or the flavoring of their tea, or the sound of their voices on a winter morning, or their smell to a child sitting in their laps. We have nearly lost them. When the family forgets their names, they will have vanished, their flame snuffed. Then their immortality will have to be sustained elsewhere, in some other way.

It’s reasonable to hope, given the record of my forebears, that I’ll be here in a couple of decades, knowing who I am still. And yet I might, as my friend says, collide unfortunately with the bagel-truck this afternoon. I’ve reached the age when it’s folly not to be ready. The world is full of fools and I inherit folly, and no one of course is guaranteed another day. But now it comes across to me, there is no more time to mortgage. I cannot sign away this year, this month, this moment to The Idiot, in hope of future Authenticity. The Promise must be Now. Now must be the Promise.

Which is not to say There Shall (Or Not) Be Fun. There will be some fun, and some fear, some laughs and tears, but whatever is to come, it must be Real. No more flight from the moment toward a dicey future. No more career moves unless they pay off now. The present is what I know I have. It must make sense. I must make sense of it. Readiness is all.

Any fool who would undertake the task of my biography would die of boredom before he finished. I haven’t done much. It’s all in the subtext. The subject would require a different historiography.

My children will remember the sound of my voice, the shape of my shadow, the smell of me when they sat in my lap. In my vanity I’d also like to leave them something more articulate, and in truth my articulation is much of what I am. It’s my grain, my odor; it’s the size of me against the sun. This isn’t true of most people. It’s something really odd about me. Some don’t like it, and I can’t help that. But if you love me then you love this, whether you like it or not.

It’s a promise as old as literature. Ars longa vita brevis. I don’t ask as much as that. I don’t have to be on bookshelves two millennia from now. If these shadow-plays survive me, if some of my descendents, children of the genes or of the heart, can read my subtext, then they’ll know that there was someone here doing this. I hate being photographed, and yet I leave these polaroids behind. There he is. The crank. Old fart. Transparent. Inscrutable. Insatiable. Teachable. Lover. Critic. Disciple. Witness. Acolyte. Partner. Father. Brother. Child. It will have been, as the Jews have said for centuries, enough.

*”Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments”

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

leechlike creature

The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy


Near the beginning of the story, this “small, yellow and leechlike” creature is implanted in Arthur Dent’s ear, allowing him to communicate with alien creatures of all time and space, and to engage with the novel’s farcical conquests, tantrums, neuroses and mass exterminations. Honorifically named because it erases human penalty for arrogance, the creature’s talent is a cure worse than the disease. Perhaps it’s for the best that, after Babel’s fall, we were sent to our corners, bounded by language. Peace has as much to do with what we don’t know about each other as it does with what we do know. We’ll know that peace has broken out when we’re all sitting under our own fig trees without fear; but if I knew what you really think of me, it could make me afraid, very afraid. No telling then what I might do to you. Or you – see how empathic I am! how symmetrical my moral reasoning! – to me. There’s a long-developed art of peace called diplomacy. Knowing when to shut up. Knowing when not to break down barriers to comprehension. If you can’t say anything nice, then . . .

There’s a motto of my church’s religious education, a “chalice-lighting” that hangs on the wall to be spoken near the beginning of worship. “Let us light a candle of understanding in our hearts, so that we may understand how other people think and feel.” It’s a good lesson for children, who begin (if they are lucky) as idolized masters of all they survey, and two mere decades later must find their way alone across the world’s savage trading floor, seeking direction amidst a multitude of other atoms who shriek their claims of value. If children don’t learn that there are other people, and that those other people think and feel, there’s not much safety to be had in this world. If they don’t learn to hear some of those thoughts and feelings as comparable to their own, there’s not much happiness. But what should we grownups do if we come to understand that what my neighbor thinks and feels is a transcendental desire to kill us, and our children?

We learned a lot on the eleventh of September eight years ago about what some other people think and feel, and I doubt that we are better for the knowledge. We may think that some proper, timely intervention, by force or by more perfect love, might have forestalled this moral disaster; but the disaster was not forestalled and we got the message right between the eyes, that some people would give their lives to end the lives we cherish. The choices before us now are perilous, pricey and ugly.

It makes me nostalgic for an older form of life, when isolation had a logic. Some places that were hell on earth could be ignored, because they had no power to bring their hell to us. Leave them alone, you can’t fix it, they can’t touch us here. But now a fanatic on dialysis, fugitive in mountains at the end of the earth, can make me gasp every time I – or a child of mine – goes down the subway steps. I wish he and I had never met.

I heard a student minister say he had taken a vow of transparency, never to tell any lies. He didn’t learn how I thought and felt about his vow, because I didn‘t tell him. My God, I thought, the parish will eat you alive; and as for your private life, Lord ‘a' mercy, who will live with your barrage of Too Much Information? These things he’ll have to learn on his own.

I’ve lived with the same person for forty-two years, and I don’t know everything she thinks and feels, nor she of me. Emerson said the Eye – Shakespeare’s I -- is the First Circle. Each of us stands in the center of the horizon that our eye marks out, and if you stand within my circle (and I yours), we might eye each other. We are not identical. Our circles would intersect but, drawn from different centers, they are not the same. I do not comprehend all of you, nor you of me (unless one of us were master, one the slave.) There are reaches of you that, because of my love, I shall never see. You shall not be dissolved in me. Keep something to yourself, for the love of God. Love has its expression, but intimacy has its timely reticence. As for agape, its limits give it life.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

almost enough

They also serve who only stand and wait.

-- Milton, “On His Blindness”


Ramon once told me his life story in the way he could, digging out a hill of photographs and documents from his bedroom drawer: work papers, family photographs, post cards from his long missing son. He lies in bed now when I come to see him, arms and legs shaking even at rest. He can’t speak or write intelligibly. He doesn’t have enough motor control to use a computer keyboard. He can’t manipulate a boom box without breaking it.

This last fact is important because he is a musician. Ramon used to play in an island band, in a folk genre that announces to the diaspora of his native Caribbean island their longing for home. His instrument sounds a bit like a mandolin. It rests cracked and unstrung against the wall of his bedroom, long unused.

I never knew Ramon when he could still play his music. In my first visits he would come from the bedroom to meet me, supporting himself on his walker. Sometimes I could understand his speech and gesture; sometimes even his wife and long-time attendant could not understand them. When he could not get through to me, he would take up a pad and write; sometimes I could not read his writing. Now it’s much worse. And worse again, because he has much to say: his mind is unaffected.

I consulted with an expert who knows the culture of Ramon’s island. She taught me about the artists, the content of songs, the idiom of his instrument and its function in the band. With this knowledge I could talk with him about the music. He gave me homework, lending me discs of defining artists in this music of his country’s interior mountains. Sometimes we sat and listened to his favorite songs. He would noodle with the fingers of his right hand on his left forearm, as if he were picking out the notes. There! That’s my part, do you hear it?

Now I visit in collaboration with the Music Therapist. She brings a bag of hand-held percussion. One of these instruments is black, the size and shape of an egg, and when you shake it the seeds inside strike the shell and slide around; it’s like a maraca. We play the music on the boom box, and put the little eggs in his hand: he finds the complicated counter-rhythms of each song.

As I write this, it looks to me as if we’re doing rather well, but this is for me the hardest kind of case to sit with. There’s so much I cannot do. I heard his story long ago. I can less and less understand what he tries to say. I feel like a fool.

There was a time when I tried to drop the case. I said to myself, you’ve done what you can; you’ve tried all your tricks, and he’s tried his repertoire with you. You can’t understand him any better than when you first came. Let someone else have a try. I referred him to a colleague, and explained to Ramon that I would not be coming to visit any more.

I left Ramon’s apartment feeling like a traitor. I took home with me the grief in his eyes. Through the following vacation I thought of him. When I came back I found that my colleague had not visited yet. I called him off, spoke to Ramon’s wife and said never mind, it was all a mistake, I’ll be visiting again this week.

So now the Music Therapist and I support each other, unsure how much more of this we could bear on our own. What makes this so hard is that he has so much he wants to do and so much he wants to say. I too have much to say. What if I could not say it? What if kind and intelligent people stood around me, waiting for the message I could not send them?

I doubt that Ramon knows Milton, but he must feel, like blind Milton, that his “one talent which is death to hide” is “lodged with me useless.” He cannot stand, so he must lie and wait. But I also am blind – and deaf. I can neither hear nor see his song, and so am useless too. I stand and wait. What are we waiting for? A way out of our dead end.

What do you do when your skill runs out? You stand naked in the wind, your mortality exposed. The client’s exposure, though different from yours, is also mortal.

When I threatened to leave, there was something he grieved for. Perhaps it is my exposure that comforts him.

There’s so little we can do for each other. But that little, if we can locate it, is not nothing. It is something. It is, perhaps, sometimes, almost enough.

Monday, August 31, 2009

squash balls

He taught them as one having authority.

-- Matthew 7:29 (NRSV)

My teacher – my sensei, though he did not want the title – stood before me with a squash ball in each hand. He was going to toss them both, and I was to catch them both, at the same time. But not by looking at them.

The others had attempted this, with degrees of success and failure. There were the ones who got all confused and missed both balls. There were the ones who concentrated on one ball while the other flew past. There were the ones who caught them both but went off balance, taking extra steps and showing how hard it all was. And a couple of the best young barbarians showed that they had gotten it. They really had gotten it. They threatened me. I was five years older. I was the teacher’s assistant. And I was learning what I should have learned before I was six – how to live in a human body. Everything that was easy for them was bitterly hard for me. They had learned to juggle in five minutes. Me, five weeks. And not well. And I would never get any better.

When I took the first year’s movement training for actors from my reluctant guru, he had not done this exercise. This was something new. I knew what the principles were. I knew how it was supposed to work. But I had never done it.

I was the master’s assistant. I couldn’t back down from the barbarian challenge. (I was the only one in the room who thought there was a challenge.) I had to do what they had done.

So I stood before the boss, ready to show myself, and him, and the others, a thing or two. Anyone who knows the literature of martial arts training – which this was not, and yet I thought myself in a severe dojocan tell you that this was a corrupt situation. The more I tried to prove something, the more I would confuse the issue. “Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!” said the Master Kenzo Awa to Eugen Herrigel, when he began the study of archery.*

I breathed deeper than belly-breathing: I breathed into my crotch. I sent the ki through my feet, through the floor and into the earth. I looked into my teacher’s eyes and out the back of his head. I was somewhere else . . . and then the squash balls were soft in my hands. I had no thought of how they got there. There was silence in the room. My errors of intention had canceled each other out. For a moment I had become the model, the master’s assistant, to be admired and imitated.

In my years with this teacher, I never did better than that. I’m not really talented in this sort of thing. When I met him again years later I could not replicate this moment.

In another phase of life I worked with a great musician, on his way toward international fame. He was keyboardist, scholar and conductor, expert in the Baroque – and yet the sum of these prodigious skills did not contain his authority. He had touched the scores of Handel, Purcell, and Rameau; he knew what books they read, what clothes they wore, who they slept with and what they ate for breakfast. He could play anything in any style or key, and never played the same notes twice, particularly when playing the same piece. He worked from original sources rather than from tradition, so he never asked permission and was his own rule. Though he was rather a kind man, I could feel his impatience with the merely good musicians who had to work things through. He would have done well in my senseis studio, catching squash balls out of the air without thinking about it.

I think of a boy with his voice just breaking, left behind in the temple and disputing scripture with men several times his age. Speaking not like a student, tremulous and apologetic, asking permission and begging pardon for his interruption; but speaking as if he knew what he was talking about, turning the Law around in the light to reveal its unexposed facets, as if he had authority. How dare he catch the truth without effort?

The truth behind the truth is not to be exposed by effort. If I have to convince you that I ought to be here with you, then I ought not to be here with you. If I don’t already have the power in my hands, I can’t ask you for it.

*Zen in the Art of Archery (trans. R. F. C. Hull)

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the phrase “post a comment.”

Sunday, August 30, 2009

funky priest

Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
-- A. E. Housman

Taking her hand was like stepping into a wind tunnel. She drew me with all the force she was losing. I braced myself on the bedrailShe held on, as the cliché goes, for dear life. She was holding on to me.

As the grey tabby curled by her bandaged head and the orange one at her feet, a brain tumor was killing her. She could understand but couldn’t say much. I figured out that she could answer a question, if the question included words that she could answer with.

I’ll ask you some questions, Caitlin, so I can find out how you’re feeling, if that’s all right.” “That’s all right.”

“Are you afraid of something? are you in pain?” “Afraid of something.”

“Afraid of what, Caitlin? of afterlife? of dying itself? Something else?” “Of dying.”

She and her sister auditioned me. These two had left three more sober siblings in Ireland, in favor of a bohemian life: they weren’t going to accept a chaplain who wasn’t “funky.” I wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t found me funky enough.

Caitlin feared that her tumor was God’s punishment for her sins. It would mean her life had been wrong.

She was a trans-Atlantic stewardess in a time when the title certified that you were female, single and easy on the eyes. She made her own rules in the air and afterwards. She was a friend of poets and artists, an inspiration to her younger sister, and a closer of taverns on either side of the pond, on first-name basis with the precinct police, who would drive her home with the barstool from which they could not extract her. She was a wild Celtic Catholic woman, estranged from her church and half her family, and holding on to me.

Here there be monsters, but we can’t in good conscience deny ministry to the attractive. Firefighters run into burning buildings, and we run toward grief and fear. That’s why people look at us with pitiful eyes. How can you do that? they think, why would you do that? But it’s our calling: we must pluck up courage and learn the skills. And chief of these is to name the beast on which we ride.

For minutes at a time you might have watched us in seeming silence, the grey tabby in my lap, Caitlin holding on to me, I holding on for both of us. She was the sprite who lured Merlin into the woods; and I was her funky priest, a druid rather standing in for priests whose judgment she loathed and feared, but whose absolution she desired. These projections almost matched up.

You may say this was a corrupt bargain, a deal of deceptions. Compared to what? I say. It was this or nothing. In extremis she opened her heart, and closed her hand on mine, and this is what came through. She didn’t have a truer version of herself to show me. Nor I to her. Speak now, and I will answer,” says the poet. I got her message right between the eyes. My answer was, I’ve felt your power, and I’m not running away.

“How shall I help you, say.” Her sister and I found a priest of compassion, who brought more of God’s mercy than of judgment, and didn’t reinforce her fear. She took Anointing of the Sick from him.

She reached the age of sixty in that bed, and died -- as best we understood her -- in peace, with all her siblings near, including the ones she left behind.

There is no pure apprehension between human beings. We are always writing roles for each other on first impressions or long acquaintance, based on the past and looking through the present toward the future. The role you write for me can only partly coincide with the role I write for myself, and neither can be verified right now. On those people I have known the longest I project my most hyperbolic hopes. I make assumptions. “We’ve known each other through thick and thin,” I say, and so I surely thought that you . . .” “Assume is the word that makes an ass of u and me. Of such flimsy stuff do we construct our bridges of longing and compassion, extrapolating from facts to what no fact can support. It’s the best we can do, sometimes asinine but sometimes miraculous. Keep moving, and keep naming the faith. Stop and drown. We walk at best on water.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the phrase “post a comment.”

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

poor readers

We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion.

-- Chris Hedges, “The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free,” www.truthdig.com, June 29, 2009

There’s a scene in some old army movie. “Snap out of it, soldier!” Smack. “Thank you, sir. I needed that.”

Hedges says we progressives still “believe in the Enlightenment ideal of reason alone, and that’s why we are “helpless” against barbarians of unreason. But he has it all reversed. Enlightenment is not emotionless. It is not cold. And we have lost our faith in it. Faithless, we are ashamed not only of our faults but of our virtues, and that’s why, when we should be rising to our duty, we hang our heads. How convenient, for ourselves and for those we should confront!

Enlightenment” is, of course, the name of a European impulse an explosion of splendid sarcasm that upended the thrones and altars of Europe, killing kings and evicting priests. In the brilliant light of criticism there could be no mysteries – no divine rights and no miracles, but universal rights and natural processes.

Similar ideas may have arisen elsewhere, but Europe brought its own versions by force to other continents. All rising peoples have their own freedom-songs; but Europe’s freedom-songs – songs that liquidated divine rights and rites – were meant to be universal, and have proved capable of universality. When peace broke out for a while in Tienanmen Square, they raised a statue of liberty. When peace broke out for good in South Africa, they played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When Dr. King came peacefully to the Lincoln Memorial, he presented an uncashed check from Thomas Jefferson. Subjugated peoples, emerging from confinement into the open space of freedom, have turned assets of Enlightenment against the power that created those assets.

We progressives are heirs to a Betrayal, but also to the Thing That Was Betrayed. By liberating its people’s energies, Enlightenment made Europe powerful; but Europe used that power to instrumentalize the world, making of the “Orient” a means to Occidental ends, inventing new divine rights for her own people and new forms of enslavement for others; and that is the Great Betrayal of Enlightenment. The cure is not less Enlightenment but more. Enlightenment, returning to judge her own betrayal, will exalt every valley and make plain the rough places.

So a reader who can’t find passion in Voltaire and Jefferson, Hume and Locke and Rousseau, is a poor reader indeed. But then, we have become poor readers who confuse amnesia with justice, neglect of our prophetic story with virtue. There are diversities to which we should not aspire, causes that think themselves aggrieved but should not be comforted. There are cultures, not just across the world but around the corner, that say their cramped reading of scripture is not be questioned; that ask for your loyalty and seize your judgment instead; that say science is the devil and sexuality – particularly yours – is evil. There are pompous thieves who claim to own the labor, the bodies, or the body parts of others, as means to their own ends. We are not perfect. We do not know everything. But we children of Enlightenment are here to make afraid those who do daily violence in the name of God – or in the name of whatever they put in God’s place. And they will be afraid, striking back if they can, for to name them is to expose their mystification and dissolve their power.

So this is no parlor game, no soirée of brie and chablis – ask George III and Louis XVI. The “Enlightenment Ideal” was not, as Hedges describes it, “that facts alone can move people toward justice,” but that claims to authority now must pass the test of reasonableness, or face decapitation. Because I say so (or because I say God says so, or because I say the people say so) isn’t good enough any more.

This is no dissertation we are writing but an epic poem. If we progressives have “lost the gift of rhetoric,” that is our own betrayal; but it is an unenlightened betrayal. Jean-François Lyotard said that postmodernity is an age of renunciation, when “grand narratives” are exposed as shabby oppressions: “The narrative function is losing . . . its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.”* Umberto Eco meanwhile travels through irony toward recovery: a man and a woman, flirting without innocence in cheapened language, can “succeed, once again, in speaking of love,” restoring the capacity for “fantastic stories, . . . the telling of dreams.”** Well, my friends, freedom is a story, the grandest narrative of a dream.

Are you for the dream or against it? Liberation takes you from one place and deposits you in another, by a picaresque route that you did not anticipate. Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial didn’t read articles of academic sociology but told a story. Or rather, he told three stories at once: the Promise of America’s founding, the Promise of Yahweh to Israel, and the Day of God’s justice rolling down like waters.

Immanuel Kant, Enlightenment’s culminator, told us that we break oppression’s simultaneous irrationality and immorality when we “Act so as to treat man, in your own person as well as in that of anyone else, always as an end, never as a means.”*** It’s a universal, not a local, principle. Freedom that stays local is to that extent no freedom.

“Fear not the new generalization,” said Emerson. He himself was slow to draw the next circle around American tyrannies, but he gave us the instrument. What isn’t wrong in principle isn’t wrong at all. If it’s not at bottom wrong to use the peoples of Africa, Asia and South America as means to European luxury, or if it isn’t essentially abominable for colorless people to steal from people of color their labor, then slavery is only a fact and not a sin. Reductio ad absurdum.

Unitarian Universalists were put on this earth to exercise religious language back to health. Our particular duty as liberals, the specific obligation of our social and theological location, is to exercise Enlightenment back to health. Self-criticism is a means to that purpose, but it is not the purpose itself. Snap out of it, soldier. Though we are sinners, we are not our sins. The greatest sin would be to throw our baby, our sacred child, out with dirty bath-water.

When light breaks over the horizon’s circle, we see who are the lions and who are the lambs. One by one and now, all the lambs must be rescued. One by one and now, all the lions must be humbled. Logos alone is not enlightened – word only shines when it is made flesh.

Thank you, sir. I needed that.

*The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi)

**“Postscript” to The Name of the Rose (trans. William Weaver)

***Metaphysical Foundations of Morals (trans. Carl J. Friedrich)

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the phrase “post a comment.”