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Dispatch
#28 The last of the month of September. A clear day, forecasting 90 degrees. Des Moines could break a record. I'm back in shorts. My left thigh is oddly lean beside the right. Tan lingers from the long days in bicycle shorts, but it hasn't the auburn-brown of high health. Autumn is a series of farewells--and the prospect of spring should be hope for the future, except that even spring, giving way to a dusty summer, must disappoint. In fact, I love the winter, could its promise of a permanent freeze be kept. In Grand Forks and in Edmonton, Canada, winter imprinted itself on my young body while I delivered 118 Journals to my route at the edge of town. There, in the evening, a wet head of hair would within a minute outside freeze to a solid helmet; and parkas made of the snow soft homes and forts; and rinks were everywhere for ice skating; and it was my job, when students of Concordia College were spraying the college rink the nightlong, to stoke a wood fire in the shack for their warmth; and we owned a seven-seater toboggan, my siblings and I, upon which we sped at astonishing speeds down the hills across Ada Boulevard to the golf course that ran along the North Saskatchewan River, filling our sleeves and our mouths with snow. But I live near Chicago, now. The first chills of winter cause my stomach to stir with glad anticipation. But the season itself at that latitude never achieves true Winter, and the promises are never kept, and folks get persistent colds, worrying that any farther north must surely be worse. Sad, misguided parvenus! Heaven will offer a solid cold when every foray out of doors and in a downy parka will delight the Saved with a lasting sense of sweet survival. + + + I just finished reading THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold. The narrator speaks from "my heaven" after she has been raped and murdered. In fact her voice carries almost no judgment for anyone on earth, including her murderer, whose career she follows long years after her death at fourteen. I could have wished that the "heaven" of this book were more than a creative perspective, a literary device carrying lightly some mild speculations about the lingering attentions of dead souls upon earthly matters. I could have wished that it were a rather bolder investigation of matters eternal and mysterious than (what it was) the most common and universal feeling that the dead hang around. But, after all, the writer made literary choices rather than genuinely spiritual ones. (So say I, though she might disagree with me.) The American Indians think much more deeply than this book does of other lives, the soul, morality, mortality and God, Wakan Tanka. In fact, Alice Sebold can depict an untutored child's version of heaven over which and in which and for which there is no God at all. The idea never comes up. The deity--once known throughout the earth--is scarcely to be known in the eternities any more. Except that it attends to the true reconciliations of people who have sinned against one another and in whom there is the possibility of loving again (ever the human's source, never of sources beyond the human) this book is ... cute. Love, in the mind of the principle character (and even perhaps in the author's mind) is love-making, and the best the earth has to offer one with limited time thereupon. + + + If writers write in service of nothing so much as their own imaginations, their delight in the well-turned sentence, their nearly deific ability to call into being worlds which otherwise never were, then their work is like self-contained satellites, small planets, floating unmoored throughout a dark universe of unmeaning. To those "islands," as it were, readers will attach. Some, too, delight in the same things the writer does; some will find definition and form for their own lives, essentially unbound to anything larger than smallish human community; but these satellites of self-contained sense have exchanged genuine mystery for what must be seen as (merely) the edges of ignorance. Beyond their knowing is not something greater, with fierce love invading their known lives and their knowing; beyond their knowing is (merely) not-knowing. Whenever has such at artistic state existed before? The Greeks reached for perfect form; even the Romans conceived of their world swirling with gods, goddesses, stories of tremendous grandeur in whose light the human story could transcend the mundane and touch mystery. (Nowadays we say that their stories of the gods were no more than types and templates, symbols for the lives of humans sealed within themselves.) The most breathtaking art in the past contained ever an element of worship, or appeasement, or propitiation: communications and offerings to eternal gods, or else the Eternal God. But lately we have found ourselves the highest subject for fine contemplation--as if in us (and so, in fact, do some insist) were mysteries and divinities enough. But we are nothing if not limited. We may dream, but we may not do the extensions of our dreamings. We may wish, but we shall die. We may conceive of something like righteousness and a self-less goodness; but we are not, in the events of our lives, either of these things. And so artists today are as likely to beat up on human ideals as to depict them. "Piss Christ," a hundred plays I have read, Post-modernist interpretations think their value is in anti-value: the crafty, gleaming, self-satisfied condemnation of values others hold dear. But let me turn my criticism equality about: for much Evangelical "Praise" music, too, is bounded by a human understanding, unwilling to stand (in speechless wonder and in sacred terror) before the living God, the Mysterium Tremendum, whose presence shatters comfort and self-satisfaction; the effect of whose righteousness is first to reduce the worshipper to the grass of the fields which fadeth away. Rather, "Praise" music makes of God not the Creator Father, but the gentle grandfather in whose presence we are all children as glad as on the Eve of Christmas, special, sweet little lambs, protected and (by this we judge the love of our rocking-chair god for us) prosperous. Does God love us? Well, let me see: how large is our church? How big are our parking lots? How manifestly huge are our programs? No, but does God love us? Answer that by asking: when have we given away our "things" to walk among prisoners? We walking among the prisoners!--not Chuck Colson. When have we used the fullness of our resources for justice in this land ever before we impose justice on other lands? When have we first examined ourselves for the unacknowledged prejudice--and then, in the forgiveness that follows repentance, placed our very selves in between greater, more grievous prejudices and those who suffer it? This is not different than asking regarding our art, our music, our sense of (terrible, beautiful, diminishing, elevating) worship. If the Creator is great enough first to frighten the creature, and then to grant an undeserved grace that does not judge but appoints that creature to Holy Service, then our music and our poetry and our preaching and our architecture and our liturgies and our visual banners and our faithful theater will always acknowledge mystery! Mystery. That which is greater than us. Praise music never distresses--have you noticed that? It does not know St. John of the Cross--but it knows a Good Shepherding God. It does not know Paul's terrible experience on the way to Damascus, for it measures all spiritual experiences according to the weight and height of the human; it does not know the Jesus on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, standing in titanic glory between the damned and the saved--especially where its singers and musicians might fall anywhere upon that wall. "Praise" music, though it might remember the bad old days before one accepted Jesus in his/her life, is preeminently content. And so the smooth artists of this humanistic world as well as the blandly self-assured artists of a grandfather God are not at opposite poles, one from the other. For each has found a way to make of the human the standard and the purpose of its artistic expressions. Stravinsky knew mystery. Thomas Mann did. Faulkner and Dickenson and Eliot and Benjamin Britten and Bach and Glenn Gould and Leif Enger and the composer Randy Courts did and do. Dostoevsky could not escape mystery. Or read The Cloud of Unknowing. Read, carefully and slowly, not denying passages too sensual for modern tastes, Julian of Norwich, noisy Margery Kempe, the shameless prayer Christopher Smart, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne--or Richard Crashaw, whom I quote below: ON OUR CRUCIFIED LORD, NAKED AND BLOODY Th'have left thee naked, Lord, O that they had! Walt |