A Morning Walk


     ‘He was a sharpshooter you know.'
     ‘Really.  No, didn't know that.'
     Two men walked along a river bank.  Both were about the same age, but one was tall and thin, with a beard and a sweater and bifocals that still embarrassed him, the other stocky and less tall, with a bald head and a denim jacket.  Call them Jeff and Mark. 
     It rained steadily but lightly over the water, while heavier drops fell from the trees overhead.  Low clouds barely moved in the sky as the river flowed, fat and brown and full of debris.  A breeze blew cold and damp though it was late spring.
     ‘A sharpshooter and a pilot - how'd he manage that?'
     ‘Don't ask me.  Wouldn't know.'
     ‘But you went in, didn't you?'
     ‘Oh yes, joined the Air Force like he did.  Wanted to be in the Special Forces like him too.'
     ‘But that didn't work out.'
     ‘No, that didn't work out.  You remember my pneumonia - scared my lungs up pretty badly.  Then there's my weak heart.'
     They had not seen each other in twenty years, not spoken in twelve, until last night when there seemed no one else to call, to find, who would understand.  Mark drove through the night and into the morning to arrive by six.  They had said nothing since then, but had walked along the river, walked for a couple of hours.
     ‘How did he...,' Mark started to ask.
     ‘How did?  Oh.  There was some old rope in his garage.  Just enough.'
     ‘And you...you found...?'
     ‘Yes.'
     They stopped and looked over the river in flood.  By now they were soaked through and cold.  A gaggle of Canadian geese flew over, their cacophonous honks filling the air.  Jeff threw a stone into the river.
     They stood thus a long while then turned to head back to the house.
     ‘Have you told Rachel?'
     Jeff stopped and looked down at the ground, digging the toe of his boot into the mud and turf.
     ‘I see.  How old is she now?'
     ‘Thirteen.'  He kicked the toe of his boot deeper into the mud and turf, said, ‘They were even closer since Kate....  Well, it was like he was some kind of god or something.'
     With that, he bent down and picked up another stone then hurled it into the river.
     ‘He wasn't, you know,' Jeff said at last.
     ‘Wasn't what?'
     ‘A god.'  Then, after a pause, ‘Anyway, I sent her to stay with one of her friends for the night.  She'll be home by now.'
     Mark paused, then asked, ‘When did you...?'
     ‘Yesterday around four-thirty, after work.'
     Again they walked, again in silence. 
     A squirrel skittered across their path and up the trunk of an oak bent and twisted by time and weather.  A cardinal sang in the distance.  After another long silence between them, the house appeared around a bend in the river.
     Jeff stopped, stared at his house a long while, said, ‘I forgot to even ask, how's...?'
     ‘She's fine, so I hear.'
     ‘So, you two....'
     ‘Last year.'
     ‘Ah.'
     Again, they walked, and as they neared the house Rachel sprang from the porch and came running toward them. 
     ‘Poor dumb bastard,' was all that Mark said as he watched her.
     ‘Poor dumb bastard,' was all that Jeff said before he caught Rachel and swung her around and around as she laughed.

Postscript to the Daily News


A butterfly alighting on a tank?
I wish it were that simple, but, my friend,
it's not.  A naive imp will gladly shank
you for those shoes; the good earth deigns to send
us earthquakes, floods; the disappearing bees
will leave us all bereft of honey; while
our CEOs collect annuities
with pay-out rates that, face it, would beguile
St Francis, who, we're told, yet had to feed
a vast menagerie, that toiled not day
to night and night to day nor spun from need.
Take heart, it's such a fashionable way:
     the reed that smolders will be quenched in haste
     so we, at last, may die with such good taste.

     Well, I found some bees - went to visit a friend in another town some hour and a half or so away.  By his house there's a hedge with hundreds of these tiny white flowers.  Don't ask me to identify it.  I always forget the common names of plants, and I never knew the Latin names.  Well, there were bees happily swarming about the whole length of the hedge.  This is the first time I've seen any, but there were a lot of 'em.  Oddly enough, though, many seemed small.  Is there a species of honey bee that is about a third the size of the ones we normally see? 
     As for Colony Collapse Disorder, if memory serves, there is a whole province in China where hapless folks pollinate all the blossoms by hand in a tedious, meticulous, complex process.  Were they to fail, whole groups of flowering plants indigenous to the region, including many fruit bearing species, would vanish.  I also seem to recall something about flowering plants and their pollinating fellows - aka bees, butterflies, and the like - arising together in a symbiotic order.  Lose one, and you lose the other, or so I'm told.
     Oh well.  At least I saw some of the critters.  As I watched 'em, I thought of Emily Dickinson, a current fellow-traveler.  For Dickinson, nature 'out there' was often mute in its terrible beauty.  She stood with others at the beginning of that flood of thought that integrated German idealism with Romantic noodlings about the inventive Self, a flood she by turns resisted and embraced, and which when combined with Darwinian turnings, rendered design questionable, and the phenomena of the world silent and intractable [one thinks here as well of Derek Mahon's admonition that we remember and in some way 'listen' to the 'Mute Phenomena'].  Such reflections brought to mind the omnipresence of bees in her work.  I recalled  lines like these:

I could not bear the Bees should come
I wished they'd stay away
In those dim countries where they go,
What word had they, for me? [#347]

What would she do if, instead of the lovely inscrutable swarms of bees that sometimes were too much to bear in their existential silence, there were simply none to be found?  Would she mourn 'em?  Will I? 
     Imagine having to gloss 'Bees' in a poem by Dickinson.  This raises other rambling thoughts about how to read something that isn't really that old.  I mean, I would already have to show someone how to countersink a screw in order to get 'em to understand that image in Melville of sharks scooping out perfect half-spheres of whale-flesh in their feeding frenzy.  Hell, there are episodes of The Simpsons that require explanatory notes and references.  How does one explain what a 'bee' was in a drab world where all feast on oatmeal and an 'orange' is a distant memory?

     So, I walk a lot.  I wander all over town, hike about our parks and preserves.  Over the last little while, I've walked through many a flowering garden and meadow, and seen thousands of blossoms.  My experience leads me to ask a simple question.
     Where the hell are all the bees?
     I've seen a few bumblebees, but no, I repeat, no honey bees of any kind.  Not a one to be found in all the many pollen wonderlands through which I've hiked and loped.  I'm not, I repeat not, making a global observation here - this is an empirical note about the area within, say, fifty miles of the Columbus outerbelt.  I also know that my experience within that area is limited.  Perhaps others have seen whole swarms of bees at play amongst the riot of flowers.  I hope they have.  Still, I haven't seen any. 
     What's more, my memory may be faulty.  That is, it just might be too early in the year, and for some reason I'm all askitter through forgetting just when the critters make their appearance.  If this turns out to be the case, I will gladly cop to my mistake.  If not, then I will ask again - where the hell are all the bees? 

     I have often used the well-worn phrase simul justus et peccator, and given it a rather odd, apocalyptic spin.  On balance, it seems good to abandon the phrase.  Unlike the lex orandi thing, it does have a traceable provenance to Luther's lectures on Romans, wherein he waded into long-standing debates over whether the concupiscence remaining after baptism was inherently sin or not, a question that had not been settled, and remained unsettled in the west until, well, now.  [Unless you're an heir of the Reformation, for then it will seem quite settled to you.  Then again, you might be a Weslyan or some other sort of Arminian...]  It seems, however, that it played no, and I mean no, part in Lutheran or any other dogmatics, preaching, practice until the twentieth century.  As such, it is a construct that grew out of some rather provincial interests amongst a group of professors, some of whom I quite like.  I do think it expresses something necessary and true - much as Chris Jones thinks the lex orandi thing does - but, given that it's in Latin and all and thus has the appearance of hoary antiquity about it, and is thus misleading in that it simply doesn't, I'll have to search for another way of saying what the simul seems to say but, really, may not.

How sick - to wait - in any place - but thine -
I knew last night - when someone tried to twine -
Thinking - perhaps that I looked tired - or alone -
Or breaking - almost - with unspoken pain -

And I turned - ducal -
That right - was thine -
One port - suffices - for a Brig like mine -

Our's be the tossing - wild though the sea -
Rather than a mooring - unshared by thee.
Our's be the Cargo - unladen - here -
Rather than the spicey isles -
And thou - not there -

Emily Dickinson, #410, 1862

*****

‘Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first,' Alexander Pope.

*****

     I have from time to time dilated on the lunacy of one Chesterton.  One thing in particular I cannot stand is his delight both in ‘dirtiness' as some sort of mortification of the soul, which he makes parcel of the virtues of English civilization.  A sure sign of this civilization is the ‘wholesome diet of beef and beer' which the innately Christian Englishman makes his staple.  Indeed, it seems that tea is for pagans - though I can't remember if they're the sort of pagans that the jolly elf though swell, or the more dour, throat-slitting, bog-hopping pagans native to his beloved Engelond.  However that may be, I offer here the antidote to Chesterton, in the form of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester.  For all I know, Chesterton could have been responding to the erstwhile reprobate.

‘In Easter-term she gets her a new gown,
When my young master's worship comes to town,
From pedagogue and mother just set free,
The heir and hopes of a great family;
Who with strong beer and beef the country rules,
And ever since the Conquest have been fools;
And now, with careful prospect to maintain
This character, lest crossing of the strain
Should mend the booby breed, his friends provide
A cousin of his own to be his bride,' [A Letter from Artemesia in the Town , To Chloe in the Country, c. 1670].

     Note the change from end-stopped to enjambed lines as Artemesia moves from the statement of the case to commentary.  Damn fine, I say.

*****

The Moon is distant from the Sea -
And yet, with Amber Hands -
She leads Him - docile as a Boy -
along appointed Sands -

He never misses a Degree -
Obedient to Her eye -
He comes just so far - toward the Town -
Just so far - goes away -

Oh, Signor, Thine, the Amber Hand -
And mine - the distant Sea -
Obedient to the least command
Thine eye impose on me -

Emily Dickinson, #387, 1862

This is just lovely in its music, both as a matter of rhythm in the lines and the modulation of vowels and consonants.  Then there's the slant rhyme in the middle stanza.  Finally, note that the conceit here is delicate, yet strong, and serves the song of a lover who is, alas, not always close, nor always warm.  Yes, if the beloved addressed is not so near, then it is because Emily is distant.

*****

‘God keep me from completing anything.  This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught.  Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and patience!' - Moby Dick, ch. 32

     Well, we here at ER have started reading the major trilogy by Sergii Bulgakov, beginning with the beginning and plunging into The Lamb of God.  It's strange and demanding and quite inventive while being, to my ear at least, distinctly traditional.  Whether that means it's all defensible is an open question.  I've just heard so much about how he's either a Grand Heresiarch [a notable enough achievement in a century of Sponges and Funks], or the most creative genius in the line of the Fathers since, well, the Fathers, that I have to find out for myself just what is going on.  By the by, just how long ago was the Era of the Fathers?  That's another open question.  It seems to depend on whether you're an Anglo-Catholic, a Thomist, a Ressourcement lover à la de Lubac and Balthasar, a Neo-Palamite thrilling to another passage on apophatic theology in Vladimir Lossky, or a Russian Sophiologist with a hangover.

     So, finally comes word of a new book by David Bentley Hart, and it's all official and everything.  Entitled In the Aftermath:  Provocations and Laments, the thing just appeared a few days ago on the Eerdmans web site.  From what I've gathered, it's a collection of essays, columns and the like.  This is good news, because since he doesn't really need to do anything, the book should come out on time.   As for  The Prism and the Veil, his collection of essays on Christian metaphysics, and the translation of Przywara's Analogia Entis, which he has produced with the damn fine scholar, writer, and Hamann expert John Betz, we'll just have to wait a while longer for 'em.
     Oh, how we suffer.
     Well.

     It's gone through many permutations, with most of the stuff I originally wrote only serving as place holders for the real thing, but finally here's at least a gesture toward the poem I wanted to write while tinkering with the awful one I kept posting. 


No Title


Three am, hardly a sound, only the whisper
of shades in the wind, a few rutting birds 
warming up in the dew, and her breathing steady
and pure.  It's that hour of helpless regret,
that hour when memory strikes, like a hammer 
blow against rock, that hour when we know we do not love
as we say, all we would love with all hopeless
lucidity if only, if only, if only...

Still at this hour I seek a sure benediction,
in deed and in word, that word from before all beginnings:
like trees barren against a bright day's horizon
we stand, quickening in promise unseen,
each a breath of speech we give back in time
dying to live in that day's waxing light.

     Another significance of resignation to hell presents itself as most right and salutary for us in this in between time of pilgrimage and repentance.  He has, you know, a particular and peculiar regard for the abandoned, the tortured, the poor, the infirm, the oppressed, the killed for convenience and profit, the mourning and the lonely - for, that is, the offscourings of our successful world.  If, dear reader, you got a shiver from the list, that's apposite.  All of us will one day wind up playing one or more of those many parts.
     Well, enough of that for now.  Consider only that God mmight just call you who have been baptized and can trust in his goodness and faithfulness and his beauty, that God I say again might just call you into the place you fear the most.  He might just call you thus as his instrument to minister to those for whom he has a particular and peculiar regard.  He might, moreover, just do this for your own good.  In short, he might send you to hell on earth for the sake of his name and the good of those whom he loves.
     More than this, any of us at any moment might find ourselves plunged into darkness, confusion, pain, doubt - we might, that is, find ourselves under attack.  Who attacks?  God?  Satan?  If Satan, what is he but God's lapdog?  Can he do anything of his own pure brain?  No, no, it's best to regard the attack as what it is - God has, it seems, turned on you, and become to you a kind of devil.  Getting up in the morning can become a burden.  Just taking another breath will seem a demand beyond your strength.  You will be, as far as you can tell, without hope and lost in the world.  You may remain in this state a long time.  You may remain in this state all your days.
     This is hard.  That sounds like an understatement?  Steel, diamonds - hard, unyielding, won't give when you hit it [I know steel, for instance, gives when certain objects hit it; I'm certain that neither you nor I are one of 'em]:  again, this is hard.  
     Then, too, you will most likely be oppressed by your sins.  The maligned abused Simul - 'tis not a license to sin, you know.  It signifies an apocalyptic battle as he attacks our sin and we respond with excuses in place of confession, interpretation in place of obedience. 
     Daily my sins pain me. I wonder how long it will be before I am finally freed from necessity, from this grind.  Yes, yes, I am free even now in promise, a promise made real through a foretaste in the Eucharist.  Still, we live in an overlapping, intertwining of times, pulled simultaneously [simul!] into the future of the Kingdom that is coming and has, in some way, come already, while dragged down, and back, into the Old Aeon of Law, Sin, Death.  The force of this tormented pull on frail creatures like us would be too much to bear were it not that he holds all together and carries us through.  So, trusting his sure and certain word of promise and pardon and peace, we can fight the sin that so oppresses us.
     In between the times, there is sorrow, there is suffering - that loss which we experience whether sensible of it or not.  We are peculiar creatures, with a peculiar destiny, living in space-time and so moving ever on a pilgrimage whether we like it or not.  Which path we're on, well, that's another story.  On that way, we may recall with Pascal that Christ 'is in agony until the end of the age'.  The one who of his own nature can't suffer, has without change taken flesh and, in that all real humanity, suffered for us to the point of torture and humiliating death.  Now, having been vindicated by the resurrection and glorified in the ascension, he yet suffers in his flesh for this deadly and yet, for all that, saved and cherished world.
     So, as St Silouan says, 'remain in hell, and do not despair' - though only his word, his pardon, his forgiveness refreshed daily can keep that despair at bay.  Remain in hell, for now, if need be, for he is surely coming.  Even now, his appearing is imminent, and we with every step are on the brink of eternity.  So remain in hell for now - he will come in a little while and sweep it all away with a wave of his sovereign hand, then wipe away all our tears. 
     Remain, then.  Hold the line for just a little while.
     Peace out.

     How many times to hear it, that wondrous pious affirmation that should God wish, one would go to Hell for his glory?  It's an expression of deep love and affection for our Lord, don't you know, this resignation to hell.  After all, what greater lengths can a creature go than to joyfully, without rancor, speed its way to perdition for the greater glorification of God's glory and so on and so forth?  While all about it the denizens of hell bewail their fate and curse God, this happy creature, delighted with such a command, spontaneously breaks forth into songs of praise and thanksgiving at such a gift as the chance to show how great is God's greatness, how just is his justice, how glorious is his glory - and, let's not forget, just how pious that creature is in desiring only what God desires.
     Ah, majestic vision of majesty unfolded in such a just judgment justly meted out and happily received!
     What tripe!
     Consider - if you want what God wants, desire what he desires, love what he loves - if, in short, you would and will spontaneously do his will, you can't go to hell.  There is no place for you there.  Hell is full of all sorts of folks who are united by a common purpose - they all hate God.  You might say that Hell is a model of unity in diversity.
     What's more, it's not so much pious to desire to go to hell under any circumstances, as, well, whatever is the opposite of pious.  It's a sin, I should think, this blinkered willingness to be eternally separated from Love himself.  Consider - God is love, Satan is hate, and there's the end of it, so what is hell but eternal communion in hatred, an ever growing hatred moreover, one that is always more intense more desolate more crushing than it was just a moment before.
     Now, I'm told by some, often of a distinctly German persuasion even if they write in French, that to desire beatitude, that is, to desire eternal life in communion with God, is anthropocentric, self-centered, and a symptom rather of Eros than Agape.  Leave aside the fact that the supposed distinction between Eros and Agape is a figment of a diseased, post-Kantian imagination, while we think about this for a moment.  If God the Most Holy Trinity made us for communion with the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, so that we might, say, glorify him and enjoy him forever; if, I say, we have, oh, a chief end and purpose that is nothing less than eternal life in ever more intense and joyful feasting, singing, embracing of Jesus Christ and one another for his sake; if, again, all this is true, then, well, it seems to this biased fellow that to want anything else, to settle for anything less, is nothing more than mortal, damnable stupidity.
     Let's be clear - I want eternal blessedness, the beatific vision if you will, which is not really some sort of 'immediate vision of God's essence', whatever that might mean, but the immediate vision and embrace and voice of Jesus Christ, the image of the Father, on whom rests the Holy Spirit.  I want Mount Tabor through all eternity, seeing Christ as he is, that man who is as such the Son of God in whom, for whom, and through whom all things are made.  I want to see his glory reflected in the faces of all the saints in light, and illuminating all the transfigured creation of the new heaven and new earth.  I want the eternal banquet, the wedding feast of the Lamb.  And, and, I want all of you there as well - the more the merrier, I say.
     So spare me the inflated sense of piety in the resignation to hell.  Sinner and downright bastard that I am, I hold to my baptism and the promises of the One who can't and won't lie and so hope without fail to one day in my flesh see, hear, touch, and bow down before the risen, glorified Jesus, who came not to cast us all into hell, but to save and love us from now and to the ages of ages.

     Josef Fritzl, the man from Lower Austria who kept his daughter in the cellar for 24 years and repeatedly raped her, could, if convicted, get up to 15 years in prison; if, that is, if prosecutors can prove 'murder through failure to act', he could face more jail time.  Of course, he's an old man, so any sentence could be life.  Anyway, we won't know more until the State runs extensive psychiatric tests on the guy, because, you know, a man who locked away his daughter in a specially built bunker fitted out with kitchen and the like; raped that daughter repeatedly; fathered several children with her; lied about both her and three of the children to his wife and 'other family' - who, it seems, rather happily and all unknowingly lived above the horror; and now refuses to so much as offer a word of defense; such a man might, just might, be crazy.

Love Song


An afternoon with
my love, our
moans lost among wandering
stars;  
 
later, I drink
and write poems while she
dreams -
can't steal time with

our trysts, yet it seems
in love we won't
age, or rule each
to our hurt

as we play, fleeting, under
wandering stars.

     It seems that last Sunday, Palm Sunday in the Eastern Calendar, the Armenian and Greek Orthodox got into a fight over who would get to use the church at the supposed sight of Jesus' tomb.  Indeed, Israeli police had to quell the battle.  What's more, if memory serves, a Muslim family has had charge of the keys to the church for several centuries.  [I might confuse here the church in Jerusalem with the one in Bethlehem.  In either case, from what I've seen in the past several years, that some third party holds the keys to either church is all for the good.]
     This running battle is our most dependable yearly manifestation of grass-roots ecumenism.  You see, the conflict doesn't just involve Armenians and Greeks.  No no no, my friends, all manner of Eastern and Roman Catholics get into the fight; even the Franciscans have been known to throw rocks and hurl insults from their slice of the church's roof.  Still, the Orthodox of all stripes have been most pugnacious of late, and as their Pascha looms, this will only get worse. 
     To the point - their attachment to this place is pagan all the way down.  Let's assume for a moment that Jesus really was buried and rose from the dead right there on that very spot.  The fact of the matter is it would matter not a damn.  Yes, that's right, that place is no more sacred than my toenail.  Yes, yes, were I able to afford an off-season ticket I might pay a visit just to see what all the fuss is about.  All the same, let me make it as clear as possible - there is no sacred significance to that site.  Going there has about the same yield for your life in Christ as a good bottle of Riesling; in fact, the wine is better for you.
     Jesus has indeed died; he has indeed risen; he has ascended to the right hand of the Father - this is the 'heavenly session', don't you know, wherein he intercedes for us; the Spirit has fallen on the earth and set fire to the whole thing, every speck.  No plot of dirt is more sacred than any other. 
     All this is to say, the fullness of time has come; all in Christ are a new creation, knowing him no longer according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.  This doesn't mean he has ceased to be Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish man with scars on his hands, feet, and side.  No, it's that in the Spirit we see that Jewish man and know him to be the Son of God, the one in whom, for whom and through whom all things were made.  Jesus is, precisely as that Jewish man from Nazareth, the Cosmic Christ, who died for the sins of the world and to defeat death at its own game. 
     'Why do you look for Jesus?  He is not here....'  In a way, he is gone from us, but by the power of the Spirit all creation is present to him as he reigns at the right hand.  He has sent us into the world to proclaim the Gospel; he has promised to give his very body and blood to us in communion; water with the word suffices to unite a squealing infant to him for all eternity, because such is his sovereign will and desire.  Could one prove that they had found Jesus' tomb, it would be of historical interest to be sure, but the eschatological, indeed apocalyptic reality in which we live is that all such things are irrelevant to his claim on us and his call to us. 
     So, to make hay out of this ancient church, such that you would get into a battle over who gets to use it when, is simply idiotic.  More than that, it's pagan.  Apollo's Delphic Oracle; Tai Shan; the Dome of the Rock; the Church of Saint Peter; Wittenberg and Zurich and Geneva; the Ganges; all such have been leveled in light of the breaking in of the hidden yet real New Creation in Jesus Christ.  Fascinating places, to be sure, full of historical significance and worth a visit, and yet, for all that, even now fading as the old is exploded from within by the New.
     The point of this ramble?  Build a hotel over the tomb if you want.  He's not there.  And let no one enslave you to such pagan noodlings.
     Peace out.