(After not writing in my local paper for a year and a half [see my webpage for a detailed explanation], I decided that it was time to attempt to break the silence. The editor was gracious enough to print the letter with some editing -- space is a commodity and my writing tends to consume space. I understand the need for the edit, in other words. But as I have space here, I am going to post the unedited version as it contains some background insights that a reader might find interesting.)
Dear Editor,
I will begin with apologies. This is bad form, but necessary.
I apologize for asking to speak in a forum which no longer wished to print my words as of a year and a half ago. I must beg enough of the community’s – and the editor’s – forgiveness as to tolerate a few more words.
And I apologize to myself for breaking an oath to never ask to speak here again. But there are things more important than pride.
After a year and a half of semi-forced retirement from the life of my birth-community, I have read something here that compels a response. It needs an uncommon response, and my conscience won’t let me rest without doing this.
Mr. James Brady, in a letter of 8 January 2008 entitled, “Tired of people running down our country,” presented ideas worthy of careful consideration.
He begins by asking, “What is wrong with our country?” and this is where I part company with him. The deeper and better question is, “What is wrong with our world?”
Mr. Brady continues: “We too often just let people bad-mouth our country when we should straighten them out. When they start running down our country we should tell them how great America is. If that don’t take care of it, we should make them understand the hard way.” By “the hard way,” he seems to suggest violence. If he wasn’t suggesting violence, more care with the language might be desired in the future.
My own response is to ask a religious question, as many readers here are said to be religious: “When I stand before God Almighty, will He ask me whether I was a good American, or will He wonder if I lived up to the gift of being a human?”
From an ultimate point of view, does my being American increase my worth as a human one iota, and does the fact many people are not Americans decrease their worth one whit?
Being an American, aside from the privileges involved, is also nothing more than an accident of fortune.
Hear me out.
One of the things deeply wrong with this world is that we humans construct barriers – like tribes and nations – that allow us to ignore the truth that, in the depths of our beings, we humans are all children of one and the same Mysterious and Eternal Deity.
We are all daughters and sons, princesses and princes of a Holy and Royal House that was before all others and will be after all others are gone. Our lives are all equally precious, and none of us should ever be made to feel alienated or inferior, treated as less than we truly are.
Ignoring all the artifices fashioned to keep me separate from my brothers and sisters, if I look within myself, I find, behind the darkness of doubt and selfishness and hate, a blazing star: a bright, burning spark of the Divine that belongs to God Himself. It is a perfect and beautiful fire that is God’s and remains close to Him always.
Nothing I or anyone can do will ever mar, diminish, or destroy it. It is pure and inviolable. It is fearless, immune to doubt and depression, envy, hatred, intolerance, death. It burns with love for its fellow creatures and for its Creator and for itself. It would never treat another in a manner it would not be willing to tolerate. I can choose to live by orienting myself to it, or I can wander in darkness and pain.
This part is my humanity, my fate, that which I am asked to live up to. It makes me a person and not a thing. It allows me to creatively bestow value upon all things in the world except other people who are all filled with the same light of this fiery, divine spark. Other people are, as the philosopher Kant said, inherently valuable, due my respect. More than that, others are due even my love.
Not just me and my kin, my community, my state and nation, but all people, even my enemies. Even people who have worked very hard to forget the light, people who have listened to doubt, hate, anger, and the temptation to violence. People who have constructed boundaries and meaningless distinctions between themselves and other people that allow them to pretend their brothers and sisters are inferior, inhuman. People who have been deceived into believing they can beat others into submission with words, fists, and gossip, isolate them, discount them, imprison them, wage war on them eternally.
If saying these things makes me a friend “of America ’s enemies,” I will have to plead that I am only attempting to follow my Savior, Jesus.
If the Christians are right, Jesus was both God and man at the same time. He came here voluntarily to live with us and give us the example of the right way to live, to follow the light in spite of the darkness. He lived here as a stranger, few welcomed Him, many found Him a bother. He said things like, “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head” and “A prophet is not honored in his own land.”
In the end, He was crucified and suffered an excruciating death. Many believe it was His blood being shed that saves the world in some way.
Let me propose this: On the cross, the Christ completed His work, which was to show the right way to live. He did not resist those who hated Him and misunderstood, He did not curse them. He forgave them: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” He showed infinite patience. Being a good Jew, He prayed the Psalms of David as best as He could for comfort, just as He had renewed the teachings of the great Rabbis during His life, exemplifying the spirit of the Law, not merely the letter.
Christians are told that, if He had desired, He could have come down from the cross at any moment. He was, after all, God; thousands of legions of angels were surrounding Him, awaiting the Word He did not utter.
But Christians seem to forget: With that same Word, He could have ended all of this. He could have exacted revenge on those who caused Him harm, those who did not understand, those whose eyes were darkened and deceived by hatred and fear – He could have ended this world and all of us with it, as we are all both light and darkness mixed together, all sometimes filled with anger and hatred and fear. He could have seen only the darkness in us and extinguished the lights – started over again with a new universe.
But He did not. He forgave, He tolerated, He withheld vengeance. He understood something: There are more important things than surviving at any cost. We cannot do anything we wish to others, even our enemies and those we do not like – we must not pretend the ends of our survival and pride excuse any means we see fit to exercise. We must live up to that inner purity that is so easy to forget – it is what gives us value and meaning. It guides and limits our actions. We cannot pretend to be less than we are, and we cannot pretend others are less valuable than they really are.
Even if they have forgotten.
Richard Van Ingram
10 January 2008
Showing posts with label mysticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mysticism. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
From the Silence * 31 October 2007 *
Overlap and collision – things in time and out of time; people in their right mind, people out of their minds: Halloween. The old people used to say that this is night the borderlines between the worlds melt like wax tears, the night when the past becomes present and comes back to haunt us, the time when that which we pretend is far away reveals itself as ever-present and due respect, if not placation.
It’s a night we usually smile off and ignore in these days of "more important matters." Oh, what need have we of our ancestral idiocy?
But the ancestor’s idiocy is yet with us in many ways: the costumes, the candy, the parties, the vague memory of a memory when the night was actually dark and life was a delicate matter, long before we thought we’d cheat old Kronos and Thanatos at dice for our lives. Years before we dreamed we’d send Koltho, Lakhesis, and Atropos a false address when they mailed us our winding sheet – before science made life a dream and rendered our fears neuroses and psychoses for which there are pretty pills and solemn professional rites.
And yet . . . the night has not been banished completely: there are spots between the streetlights, alleyways immune to headlights and neon. There are dreams, there are nightmares, and no amount of electricity or science or psychopharmacology erases any of this. Somewhere down in us, no matter how deep we sink the half-thought, we are eaten with the knowledge that, for us all, the borderline between ourselves and The Other will melt and does melt, and it overwhelms us with terror and awe.
We know that, one day, we, too, will be translated to another state, the state of a memory becoming fast forgotten. And it causes us to recall the memory of those who are now memories, forgotten, lost, suppressed.
Worlds within worlds, worlds beside worlds, worlds overlapping – the borders dissolve: Halloween, the evening of the holy dead, of daimons, angels, demons; the evening of our forgotten Fate.
Prepare a glass of wine and light the candles in the windows to guide the souls home. Set a table for Death and welcome him; make terms with him. Because, one night, he is coming to supper whether you like it or not: He will come in the long black car and take you to a feast from which you will not return – save for days like today when we light our candles and wear the images of the denizens of other worlds. Save for the days when old memories are welcome and we honor our fears, if not placate them.
If there is a holiday in honor of depression, our Saturnine mood, it is this one, the one when we welcome all that is dark and melancholy, we rejoice in it, we do not pretend it is an illness to be fled from – it is the one time we hold our darkness close and go through it to the worlds beyond; and, if we live, we live to be richer, more imaginative in our lives. And, if we don’t survive – well, we become the stuff of imagination for another day, another’s life, another’s dreams and nightmare visions.
It’s a night we usually smile off and ignore in these days of "more important matters." Oh, what need have we of our ancestral idiocy?
But the ancestor’s idiocy is yet with us in many ways: the costumes, the candy, the parties, the vague memory of a memory when the night was actually dark and life was a delicate matter, long before we thought we’d cheat old Kronos and Thanatos at dice for our lives. Years before we dreamed we’d send Koltho, Lakhesis, and Atropos a false address when they mailed us our winding sheet – before science made life a dream and rendered our fears neuroses and psychoses for which there are pretty pills and solemn professional rites.
And yet . . . the night has not been banished completely: there are spots between the streetlights, alleyways immune to headlights and neon. There are dreams, there are nightmares, and no amount of electricity or science or psychopharmacology erases any of this. Somewhere down in us, no matter how deep we sink the half-thought, we are eaten with the knowledge that, for us all, the borderline between ourselves and The Other will melt and does melt, and it overwhelms us with terror and awe.
We know that, one day, we, too, will be translated to another state, the state of a memory becoming fast forgotten. And it causes us to recall the memory of those who are now memories, forgotten, lost, suppressed.
Worlds within worlds, worlds beside worlds, worlds overlapping – the borders dissolve: Halloween, the evening of the holy dead, of daimons, angels, demons; the evening of our forgotten Fate.
Prepare a glass of wine and light the candles in the windows to guide the souls home. Set a table for Death and welcome him; make terms with him. Because, one night, he is coming to supper whether you like it or not: He will come in the long black car and take you to a feast from which you will not return – save for days like today when we light our candles and wear the images of the denizens of other worlds. Save for the days when old memories are welcome and we honor our fears, if not placate them.
If there is a holiday in honor of depression, our Saturnine mood, it is this one, the one when we welcome all that is dark and melancholy, we rejoice in it, we do not pretend it is an illness to be fled from – it is the one time we hold our darkness close and go through it to the worlds beyond; and, if we live, we live to be richer, more imaginative in our lives. And, if we don’t survive – well, we become the stuff of imagination for another day, another’s life, another’s dreams and nightmare visions.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Midnight Between Life & Death
Tonight is the Passover, the night of the visitation of The Angel of Death, an angel with the gentle wings of a crow and soft eyes with the glances of my first and most painful love; she is the angel of full lips, dark and wet with promises; she is shy, but not too shy to step from the shadows clad only in a gown of black lace and silver stars.
There is nothing more beautiful than her hands, their slow grace fashioned by eons of motion. Her fingers move slightly as if to say, “Come: it is over. Come and rest with me in an eternity of shadow.” I am the first-born of my family, first-born and first slain on the altar of pointlessness. Even now I sadly exchange gazes with this most precious breath of a loving God and I feel the desire to take her hand and drink from the cup of her mouth, drain all of its promises, all of the waters of Lethe, to drown all of my stupidity and sin and sorrow in the warm dark spit of forgetfulness.
But tonight is Passover. Tonight I, bastard lonely child of the holy Jews, am supposed to eat the bread of affliction, the bitter herbs, the salt, set the seat and pour the cup of wine for The Sacred Stranger to return – I am supposed to remember that my life is not about taking refuge in the soft arms and gentle wings of The Angel of Death, not about fastening my mouth to hers and breathing my last apologies and thanks into her merciful lungs. I am supposed to show my awe at the One Who sends Her, show my understanding of my own incomprehension of Him and His ways; my thanks that, as lovely as She is, My God has spared me from the fullness of annihilation those wet and full lips promise.
I am a Christian – as I said, a bastard child of the holy Jews – and tonight while I sit here in the midnight hour, I find that I am sitting with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene where he prayed that the cup of His suffering and trial might pass; and was answered by God the Father with a quiet, “No.”
I am sitting here in the garden, that eternal garden where all things begin and end, that place in my heart of hearts where Gethsemene and Eden are but two words for one and the same thing, and in this mystical place I see my Lord Christ on the ground, weeping, weeping and alone. Yes, I am here, too, but I am asleep and dreaming of The Angel of Death and her charms because I am flesh, and I am weak, though my spirit may hope for better. But there, over there, right at the center of the world, in the quiet midst of all things is God-Who-has-decided-to-become-a-Man, alone with all His doubts and fears and regrets, just as I am here with my own; and yet He does not pray for Death, He prays for Life. “Angel of Death, pass over the first-and-only begotten of All; God have mercy.”
And God the Father says, “No.”
But He does so in an odd way. The Angel of Death is still here – She is always here – and She steps from the shadows, the same shadows that my own life is submerged beneath here in our overgrown, wrecked Paradise. She steps out of night and comes to my Lord, my Savior, my Master, the Holy One, the Holy Lamb of God and she catches His tears and sweat in a golden chalice; She gathers up His Holy Misery and bows before Him as He takes the cup and drains it to the last drop in obedience with the Will of the Almighty. The soft eyes of The Angel of Death are filled with amazement and startled pity at this impossible thing – that the Divine One has given Himself over to Her, and that by the next evening, Her mouth will touch His, and even God will then die.
The wind howls and the dogs with it, a low, soft moan. Men would know sorrow, too, and deeply, but we are all asleep, already dead, already half-touched by The Angel and wholly in love with Her grace. The Savior weeps alone with The Angel of Death in The Garden at midnight.
And yes, there is for me and for all Christians the sacred mystery that follows: God-become-man dies and goes down to the shadow world as all men and women must; but on that morning of the third day His tomb is empty and He-Who-has-died is now He-Who-shattered Death and the Grave. He appears as One Who already lives in a day beyond today, as the One Whose example shows that the kiss of The Angel, though fatal, is now not the final act; that Life is stronger than Death; that the apparent defeat of those who resist the world is the origin of an ultimate victory over all that would destroy the good in us. The Angel of Death is now the gateway to the transfiguration of the world: One day, even She will embrace Herself and change Her name, and Death with become Life.
**********************************************************************************
Another year has passed in the cycle of the seasons, another year and the Garden emerges in wild, untended explosions of spiced perfume in the night. There She is in the night, my sweetest love, She who will one day become Life – but today She is not Life, She is the graceful one who passes over Egypt and in whose wake there is mourning and gnashing of teeth.
Another year has passed, another year in which I have left mourning and disappointment in my own wake, filled with Death and Darkness as I am. When my friends need me was I there for them? In their Gardens of Gethsemene did I keep a vigil and pray with them, or did I fall asleep or wander off – perhaps I did not show up at all, preoccupied as I was with my own pain? Did I bother to explain?
Could I?
People in pain do not want your excuses, they want – whatever they need: each has her own needs. She wants you to ask and to listen.
Another year has passed in which I repeatedly neither asked nor listened when the need was apparent. I was too busy eaten up with my own sorrows, some petty, some not; I was too wounded and exhausted to speak, to warn friends of my weaknesses; I was too proud to admit my own needs, hint at my own disasters, and my own faults.
Who can wonder when people who expect you to be strong and caring find you withdrawn and silent, too exhausted to act? Who can wonder at their dismay, disappointment, and anger?
Each person’s life is a mystery to all others. Who knows what Hell a man may live behind his confident words? Who knows how many times in a year a woman may be crucified and in what ways? Who knows how close to taking the sweet Angel’s hand a person is at any moment and why? Anyone who’s keeping Her for close company is already near to her hand.
Do you see the anguish in the heart of another? What looks callous may, in fact, be mercy, may be sparing another the turmoil of watching as he daily wrestles the demons and his own sins and stupidities and failings.
I am a man of demons and sins, stupidities and failings. I am a disappointment – God help me if I am not. Whether by effort or laziness, by what I do or do not do, what I have done or left undone, I am guilty, and I am sorry as none of these things has been right and good. I am sorry to my God Who suffered while I ignored Him in the Garden; I am sorry to my friends whom I ignored while they suffered in their own darkness.
I have nothing to offer but old tears and a heart black as forgetfulness, empty hands, and no promises worth accepting. I am a man, I am a damnable thing. One day, perhaps, in the fullness of time when Death becomes Life, I will become who I am to become; but for today, I am a sad lover of Death whose words mean little to anyone. I care, but those for whom I care live other lives; at such distances, my words carry no meaning.
I am not God. And isn’t that the point of Easter and the Passover?
***********************************************************************************
I am not God, but I am a man.
What is fitting for a man?
To be other than he is today, to be more, to love where yesterday his heart was cold and mangled. To seek life. To go down in the grave and come back up more than a man.
I shut my eyes in the Garden of Gethsemene and dream of the Death of my sins and beg the forgiveness of my friends – and my enemies. I give you my forgiveness, my small portion of love, if you feel the need of it. I pour the cup for the Sacred Stranger and set a place at the table.
It is Passover. The Angel of Death stands close at hand. The Angel of Life stands close at hand. They are one in the same.
Richard Van Ingram
6 April 2007
There is nothing more beautiful than her hands, their slow grace fashioned by eons of motion. Her fingers move slightly as if to say, “Come: it is over. Come and rest with me in an eternity of shadow.” I am the first-born of my family, first-born and first slain on the altar of pointlessness. Even now I sadly exchange gazes with this most precious breath of a loving God and I feel the desire to take her hand and drink from the cup of her mouth, drain all of its promises, all of the waters of Lethe, to drown all of my stupidity and sin and sorrow in the warm dark spit of forgetfulness.
But tonight is Passover. Tonight I, bastard lonely child of the holy Jews, am supposed to eat the bread of affliction, the bitter herbs, the salt, set the seat and pour the cup of wine for The Sacred Stranger to return – I am supposed to remember that my life is not about taking refuge in the soft arms and gentle wings of The Angel of Death, not about fastening my mouth to hers and breathing my last apologies and thanks into her merciful lungs. I am supposed to show my awe at the One Who sends Her, show my understanding of my own incomprehension of Him and His ways; my thanks that, as lovely as She is, My God has spared me from the fullness of annihilation those wet and full lips promise.
I am a Christian – as I said, a bastard child of the holy Jews – and tonight while I sit here in the midnight hour, I find that I am sitting with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene where he prayed that the cup of His suffering and trial might pass; and was answered by God the Father with a quiet, “No.”
I am sitting here in the garden, that eternal garden where all things begin and end, that place in my heart of hearts where Gethsemene and Eden are but two words for one and the same thing, and in this mystical place I see my Lord Christ on the ground, weeping, weeping and alone. Yes, I am here, too, but I am asleep and dreaming of The Angel of Death and her charms because I am flesh, and I am weak, though my spirit may hope for better. But there, over there, right at the center of the world, in the quiet midst of all things is God-Who-has-decided-to-become-a-Man, alone with all His doubts and fears and regrets, just as I am here with my own; and yet He does not pray for Death, He prays for Life. “Angel of Death, pass over the first-and-only begotten of All; God have mercy.”
And God the Father says, “No.”
But He does so in an odd way. The Angel of Death is still here – She is always here – and She steps from the shadows, the same shadows that my own life is submerged beneath here in our overgrown, wrecked Paradise. She steps out of night and comes to my Lord, my Savior, my Master, the Holy One, the Holy Lamb of God and she catches His tears and sweat in a golden chalice; She gathers up His Holy Misery and bows before Him as He takes the cup and drains it to the last drop in obedience with the Will of the Almighty. The soft eyes of The Angel of Death are filled with amazement and startled pity at this impossible thing – that the Divine One has given Himself over to Her, and that by the next evening, Her mouth will touch His, and even God will then die.
The wind howls and the dogs with it, a low, soft moan. Men would know sorrow, too, and deeply, but we are all asleep, already dead, already half-touched by The Angel and wholly in love with Her grace. The Savior weeps alone with The Angel of Death in The Garden at midnight.
And yes, there is for me and for all Christians the sacred mystery that follows: God-become-man dies and goes down to the shadow world as all men and women must; but on that morning of the third day His tomb is empty and He-Who-has-died is now He-Who-shattered Death and the Grave. He appears as One Who already lives in a day beyond today, as the One Whose example shows that the kiss of The Angel, though fatal, is now not the final act; that Life is stronger than Death; that the apparent defeat of those who resist the world is the origin of an ultimate victory over all that would destroy the good in us. The Angel of Death is now the gateway to the transfiguration of the world: One day, even She will embrace Herself and change Her name, and Death with become Life.
**********************************************************************************
Another year has passed in the cycle of the seasons, another year and the Garden emerges in wild, untended explosions of spiced perfume in the night. There She is in the night, my sweetest love, She who will one day become Life – but today She is not Life, She is the graceful one who passes over Egypt and in whose wake there is mourning and gnashing of teeth.
Another year has passed, another year in which I have left mourning and disappointment in my own wake, filled with Death and Darkness as I am. When my friends need me was I there for them? In their Gardens of Gethsemene did I keep a vigil and pray with them, or did I fall asleep or wander off – perhaps I did not show up at all, preoccupied as I was with my own pain? Did I bother to explain?
Could I?
People in pain do not want your excuses, they want – whatever they need: each has her own needs. She wants you to ask and to listen.
Another year has passed in which I repeatedly neither asked nor listened when the need was apparent. I was too busy eaten up with my own sorrows, some petty, some not; I was too wounded and exhausted to speak, to warn friends of my weaknesses; I was too proud to admit my own needs, hint at my own disasters, and my own faults.
Who can wonder when people who expect you to be strong and caring find you withdrawn and silent, too exhausted to act? Who can wonder at their dismay, disappointment, and anger?
Each person’s life is a mystery to all others. Who knows what Hell a man may live behind his confident words? Who knows how many times in a year a woman may be crucified and in what ways? Who knows how close to taking the sweet Angel’s hand a person is at any moment and why? Anyone who’s keeping Her for close company is already near to her hand.
Do you see the anguish in the heart of another? What looks callous may, in fact, be mercy, may be sparing another the turmoil of watching as he daily wrestles the demons and his own sins and stupidities and failings.
I am a man of demons and sins, stupidities and failings. I am a disappointment – God help me if I am not. Whether by effort or laziness, by what I do or do not do, what I have done or left undone, I am guilty, and I am sorry as none of these things has been right and good. I am sorry to my God Who suffered while I ignored Him in the Garden; I am sorry to my friends whom I ignored while they suffered in their own darkness.
I have nothing to offer but old tears and a heart black as forgetfulness, empty hands, and no promises worth accepting. I am a man, I am a damnable thing. One day, perhaps, in the fullness of time when Death becomes Life, I will become who I am to become; but for today, I am a sad lover of Death whose words mean little to anyone. I care, but those for whom I care live other lives; at such distances, my words carry no meaning.
I am not God. And isn’t that the point of Easter and the Passover?
***********************************************************************************
I am not God, but I am a man.
What is fitting for a man?
To be other than he is today, to be more, to love where yesterday his heart was cold and mangled. To seek life. To go down in the grave and come back up more than a man.
I shut my eyes in the Garden of Gethsemene and dream of the Death of my sins and beg the forgiveness of my friends – and my enemies. I give you my forgiveness, my small portion of love, if you feel the need of it. I pour the cup for the Sacred Stranger and set a place at the table.
It is Passover. The Angel of Death stands close at hand. The Angel of Life stands close at hand. They are one in the same.
Richard Van Ingram
6 April 2007
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