It’s been a while. As ever, remember that I bury the lede. The props need to be set in place before the play may begin. My writing is not for the academicians who crave a clear opening thesis statement.

Once upon a time, there were these colorful, brightly lit stores scattered all about the United States. They were adorned with movie posters, their end caps bursting with B-movie shlock and various candies, and gumball machines flanked their sliding-door portals. It’s been so long that I don’t remember the exact price to rent a VHS tape from Blockbuster, but I remember enough to know that the price was much less than that of a modern digital rental from the server farms of Amazon and the like. This was back when the world still had a great deal more color than today; this was long before September 11, AD 2001, longer still before the Great Recession, longer all the more before AD 2020 and The End of, in many senses, [Western] civilization. Notice in the below how the solar colors—colors of life, the reds, yellows, oranges—are compressed by the squeezing grasp of cold blues, piercing whites, and howling blacks. Our world is becoming, quite literally, desaturated.

Recently with friends, I watched both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, both via 4K BluRays. The medium is not unimportant. For me, films remain physical artifacts, not fleeting digital ephemera of streaming services, just as the internet remains in my mind a physical construct: a physically linked network of computers whose nerves are copper wires, and whose skeleton, DNS servers, switches, routers, etc. Many of the younger generations today treat the internet as a fourth dimension—as a permanent, wireless, ethereal [cf. “ethernet”] layer which sits atop and amidst the physical dimension. To me, the internet is something which comes out of a wire, just as a film is something watched from a VHS tape or DVD. It is physical.

When you would rent a VHS tape from Blockbuster (or any other rental joint), there was always the thrill of gambling. You would pry open the little rectangular plastic case, and there was the VHS cassette, and you would see where the tape was. Was it all on the left or right spool, or somewhere in between? Like the shopping cart problem of today, there was once the VHS tape problem: when you’re done watching the movie, did you rewind the movie before returning it?

VHS tapes are gloriously analog: when you rewind (REW) or fast-forward (FF), the spools simply spin faster, causing the magnetic tape to be pulled across the VCR’s video heads at a quicker rate, causing the images to fly by faster and faster. When you REW or FF a DVD, the images will jump, not accelerate smoothly; this is because being digital, the data cannot be perfectly smoothly translated into motion. It is not physically tangible like a magnetic tape stretched taut across spools; rather, the data is being plucked up by the DVD player’s laser physically jumping between discrete storage sectors on an optical disk. This is the same reason why any attempt to recreate the iconic record-scratch effect out of CD playback results not in stylistic novelty but a destroyed CD. We shall return to VHS tapes; first, variable adventures in cyberpunk AD 2019 and 2049 are requisite. I shall avoid spoilers as best I can; I recommend both films, but for those who care, I do note that both contain unflinching violence and, shall we say, the unrobed human form. (But are the forms human if the figures are not? A question for the philosophers.)

Both Blade Runner films linger, seriously and nigh unto painfully, on the subject of memory. So much of our inner [and exteriorly realized] lives rely upon the gravity of memories. Our actions orbit our hearts, and our hearts are held together by this gravity. How we treat people is moderated and mediated by—occurring via the medium of—memory. How a person has treated us in the past informs, affects, and effects our treatment of him in turn. In their own ways, each film asks and investigates the question: what if memories were manufactured? What if your own past were synthetic, a product of artifice, of technique? What if a memory were true—it were truly someone’s—but it were not your own? What if your heart were built out of fractions—one might say, built out of the fractionated bits of others’ hearts? What, then, are you?—and more radically, who, then, are you?

We men and women have a terrible tendency to look for REW and FF buttons in our lives. We often seek to REW to brighter days, to the more vivid colors of the less desaturated past. We seek consolation from the precarious present tense in the apparent solidity and tidiness of the past tense. So often, the past appears as a house built upon rock; the present, a house upon sand; and the future, a castle in the clouds. Feeling unmoored and buffeted by the dangers and unknown unknowns of life, we REW now and again to the past. “How has this person treated me in the past?—ah, yes, we met at that, right, that thing years ago—hmm, he insulted me, right—yes, that’s it, I don’t really like this person.” But we have to remember that we dislike a person, just as we remember that we like a person. We must remember to remember our own selves, just as we so often thoughtlessly define our selves by other selves.

I dare suggest that perhaps we needn’t memory to be ourselves. We are, each of us, a self, and that self exists across time irrespective of memory. (Another filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, elsewhere argues that Love exists across time, but that is for another time, as is raising the question: might a self be counted a nucleus, or locus, of Love?) We needn’t film in order to raise this question, either. There are cases, for instance, of organ donation, in which an organ recipient gains memories from the organ donor: fears, nightmares, joys, etc. (It goes without saying that such phenomena ought raise into question the nature of organ transplantation.) There is also an argument to be made that some techniques of contemporary psychotherapy may cause a patient to auto-implant and internalize memories of childhood traumas which never even happened; but, of course, following such implantation and internalization, the memories become real, and the person lives as though such traumas did happen, when they in fact did not. Should a person experience such alteration of the past, what is altered is his self; he was a self before possessing such memories, and he becomes an altered self afterwards: but he possessed, and was, a self all along. He could, alternatively, have not undergone such alteration, and the self would have persisted. For a self exists purely in the present tense, for only the present tense touches—is tangent to—Eternity. The past is, of course, not real; and neither is the future. For how can you reach out and touch either a memory or a hope? Our world, despite our variably foolish wishes, is firmly incarnated; and flesh is a present, albeit fleeting, thing. Reality—realness—is a quality describing an instantaneous moment in time. We may touch a knotted log, lying molded and hollow in a forest, and say, “Ah, I know that this was once but part of a mighty tree”—but do we know that? The same sense-information which causes you to think you know that, cannot, in any fashion, prove that what you “know” is true. Someone could have placed that log there yesterday. God could have created it five minutes before you walked into the forest. My argument is not for nihilism, solipsism, or any such nonsense—in fact, it is the clear and bellicose opposite!—but for simple, candid consistency. You do not know the past. You may guess at it very reliably and surely, but it is not Real. You may not reach out and touch the log in its prime, and in simultaneity see what became of the log. You see the log as it is now; its past is murky. Its past was not given for you to see. Call it an existential Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

You cannot rewind the tape of Reality. You were given such a time as this, and this is a moniker for a discrete, particular point in time and space. You were given for the present tense, and it, you. What if you forgot whether you disliked a person? What if every time you met him, he were new to you? I am partial to this line of thinking because, of course, it happened to me (as described elsewhere); I misplaced my self, my memories; or, more accurately, both it and they were taken from me. And I realized that I did not remember what I “thought of” people, because I had lost the memories. All I had to go on was the present tense. I could only know them by their fruits. But is that not what we are called to do?

Besides the temptation to REW, there is another, and I posit much more deleterious, temptation: to fast-forward. You likely know this phenomenon well, even if not by that word. You have just turned thirteen. You wish to be driving, to be in high school / secondary school. You crave independence. “I just want the next few years to fly by—O, then, I’ll have arrived! Then I can really get started with my life.” You wish to FF. Or you reach that milestone of youth, and then you look ahead to college, or to working: “Ah, if only I were a few years older, and then!—then things would really be exciting. Life will be full.” You wish to FF. How many years are lived in the desire of putting them, those very same years, away? How much boredom, that terrifying horror, is birthed of a desire for some vaguely defined future moment? Thoreau remarks, “As if we could kill time without injuring eternity” (Walden); and as our only interface with Eternity is its tangent, the present tense, how right he was! To falsely claim ownership of a thing is to abuse it, to injure it; and the future tense was not given for us to possess. We gleefully look upon the future through a murky, shattered kaleidoscope which we cavalierly call a telescope. We flail about, calling it prudence, or responsibility; we delicately feed and water our “5-year plans.” How easily we rehearse, “First, this will happen, and I’ll react this way, which will set me up for that, and after a couple years, I’ll be able to pivot to this, and—”

But none of it is Real. Go on: reach out and shake the hand of your new boss at the job you’ll get three years from now after you perform two diagonal promotions via jumping between firms. Shake his hand! Look upon his eyes, tell me their color; tell me the shade of his skin, describe how light glitters upon his hair!—you cannot, you cannot, you cannot!—because he is not real, because the job is not real, because none of it is real. You have discarded the precious gem of the present tense to grasp after the sands of the future, mistaking them for priceless glass. But lightning does not strike anywhere but the present, and there is not yet any glass: you’ve nothing in your hands but sand, untransmuted and common. And so it slips away through your fingers. And you grasp harder and harder, your nails digging blood from your palms, and still it falls down, dust returning to dust, streaked with the crimson wreckage of killed time. And you never see the glass menagerie all about you, the props awaiting the play, and the play is you.

Your life is not a VHS tape. Neither is your life even a DVD like those I watched of the Blade Runners. It cannot be spooled back and forth, jumping scene from scene, avoiding the murder and horror to see “the good parts,” the talk of glittering C-beams, the talk of whose the best memories were—no. Your life must be lived squarely in the present tense, one novel moment followed by another unknowable moment followed by an unimaginable moment. Behind you, in your wake, is a littering of glittering memories: some good, some not. Some true, some not. For even the healthiest and most well-intentioned among us fall prey to formation of counterfeit memories. Our minds, cramped and straining against the forceps of Time, make up what makes sense about the past. But what makes sense? Who decides what sense even is? We do. Each self does. And we’re often right, for our minds are sharp. But, to use the alliteration of the Latin: saepe non est semper.

Often is not Always.

We are not always right. Our minds are not always sharp. In the kitchen, it is the dull blade that finds your skin.

There is a sect, a branch of thought, rampant in both contemporary Christianity and scientistic materialism. You may find it everywhere from megachurches to Leonard Nimoy’s script in Star Trek. I count it heresy and folly, alternatively. It is that your life is not about you. To the materialist—much less his midwit cousin, the effective altruist—your life is about maximizing the good of “human” lives (either yours or the maximal number of others’ human lives). What is good? Who knows. They don’t. What is human? They don’t know that either. But this yeasty idea is baked into the cake of that drunken shibboleth: for the greater good. As Spock dispassionately recites, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” The historically unmoored Christians, meanwhile, might put it as: “Your life isn’t about you, because the Bible says you are dead; you need to love your neighbors and love the world and love God and lose yourself in such loves.”

With as much respect as I may muster, I disagree. And not only that, I decline. I decline to live in such a thin puddle of a world. The world, if it were a metaphorical body of water, is a glorious, tempestuous ocean—not a mud-laced pothole of two inches’ depth. Your life is entirely, singularly, about you. What’s more, it all may be folded, like origami, into something yet grander: it is about your relations with and towards the Divine. For to be in Christ is to be in His Bride; and does a Bride best love her Groom by loving everything else too?—being concerned with everything else too?—no. She gives all of herself singularly unto Him. Then the space and capability to love other objects bursts forth, as a flower unfurls her beauty before the rising sun. But the flower has to have first accepted an obligation unto the sun in the sky and the carbon dioxide in the air.

I hesitate to say “the point” of Blade Runner 2049 is such-and-such, so I shall resort to: an animating [soul-giving] conceit in Blade Runner 2049 is this: your life may be entirely about you, but you—you yourself, your self—may be about someone else entirely. You must live by your lights, treading through each moment and scene of every act of the play which is your life: you must lay aside any imagined remote controls with their manifold buttons, resign the falsified twin potentiality of REW and FF. You must face every moment as though it were all that is Real—for that is precisely the case—and, in short, you, you plural, all of you, must, truly, carpete diem—seize the day—but you must remember Whose the day is. It was lent to you, but in the end, at the end, you must return it.

Your life is not a VHS tape. There is no rewind nor fast-forward. You known’t the length, its span in years or decades; what you have been given to know is the length of a second, and that thirty-six hundred of them fill an hour, and that twenty-four of those mark the revolution of the Sun from East to East. Those we call Saints are those whose Faith affords them the power to measure and step athwart that infinite span from East to East: those whose actions transcend the material boundaries of incarnation. They are those who work miracles: for miracles, being Love, pierce the tapestry of time and place. But let us ignore the categorical and close with the specific.

In our retellings of the story, Joseph, owner of that coat of many colors, is the protagonist of his story. This seems intuitive, after all: of course the story of Joseph is about Joseph. His brothers, aflame with the death and decay of resentment, sell him to be trafficked far away, he ends up in Egypt, a bureaucrat’s lusty wife goes shopping, he gets jailed (but not executed, as the law commanded!—the bureaucrat was no dummy) for attempted canoodling, he interprets dreams, he is exposed as a hyper-competent type of e.g. Merlin, and as wizards are, he is elevated to the king’s side; but then what happens? Well, famine, as wasn’t uncommon; and his brothers show up, there’s some intrigue, a teary reunion, everyone lives happily ever after, the Israelites end up in Egypt, that doesn’t work out well in the long-term, etc., and that’s the story. Joseph is the protagonist of his story.

Sure. He is the protagonist of his story, and his story is, mechanically, about him, insofar as it does revolve around him. Picture it this way: a wheel revolves around an axle, but does anyone ever claim that an axle is the point of a car? Isn’t the point of a car, at worst, the car, and at best, whom it carries? And so we return to Joseph. His story is about him, sure; but he is not about himself. He, his wisdom, his cleverness; his being plucked out of the well and shuffled off to Egypt; he, the protagonist, was as a wheel on a car. In the wheel’s reference frame, the axle and wheel are all. And Joseph lived by his lights, and he performed admirably.

But Joseph isn’t about Joseph. Is Joseph about Benjamin? Joseph is about saving Benjamin from famine and death, because Benjamin was the other favored son of Jacob, and—

No. Joseph, the entire wheeling, multivariate cathedral of complexities in Joseph’s life, the coincidences and betrayals and twists and turns of fate and Providence: all of it was to manufacture the props and blocking of a single scene. It was to provide Judah, his brother, the opportunity to prefigure Christ. It was to allow a man to take the guilt of another, his brother Benjamin, upon himself, willfully and freely and—literally—unjustly. And, doubly, it was for Joseph’s grain-stockpiling public works project to feed the kingly line of David bread centuries before David would lay hand upon the showbread.

In the absence of Joseph’s Egyptian sinecure, Jacob and his seed—the promised seed—starve to death. There is no Judah. No David. No Jesus Christ. No crushing of the serpent’s head. All of history hinged on Joseph. But that was, of course, all in the future tense for Joseph. He knew it not. All he knew was that famine was coming. All he knew was that he was to forgive his brothers. All he knew was his own self, and God. All else flowed therefrom. To have fast-forwarded through the suffering of his life would have been to cauterize the line of the God-man. To have ruminated in rewinds of his happier days of many-colored coats and a delighted father would have passed by his glittering, appointed drama of feeding that same father life-saving bread.

Christ was bruised and broken into bread, just as He was trampled into wine. To save the life of Judah, Christ’s forebear?—Joseph too was bruised and broken into bread.

Ours may often be lots of great suffering. The suffering is variable, and the lots are not evenly distributed. Some draw lots with evidently little suffering; others, with little evident suffering, and so on. The lots fall as they may. Our role is not to question the Allotter. Our role is to play the role written for us, upon our hearts, before Time was birthed from the splitting of the sky between Day and Night. The meaning of life is to give the question of its meaning away. Refer it to the selfsame Author of every question and every answer. The script is in your hands. We were never expected to manage memorizing so many lines, so many stage directions: and so we were given the script. You may find it everywhere, for it is written upon all of Reality. Reality itself is written in the script: all is Möbius. Life imitates Art; and Art, Life.

What the Art is which your Life imitates, and vice versa, you may never know. Some are given the eyes to see; some not. But rest assured that your life is the wheel which delightedly orbits you, your self; and though you mayn’t know the greater narrative beats to which your life plays vehicle, there is something borne up above you, sheltered from the bumpy road by your bruises and agonies, that is being preserved and kept alive and aflame. It may be as simple as your own eternal Soul—which is no trifle indeed! Or it may be something altogether much more unimaginably greater—in which case you would be right to expect bandits on the road.

Fear them not. Martyrdom, white or red, may be appointed for you: shirk it not. But remember that to choose martyrdom is to negate it. Your role is not to choose, but to roll ever onwards, running that good race. Yes, the fires and floods of death may whelm or overwhelm.

But do not forget that in the hottest fire was a fourth man, and He was like the Son of God. Appearances, like memories, may be deceiving. But you shall know Him when you see Him. He was not like the Son of God: He was. But neither was He, for He sits above Time—that arc which cleaves across Creation—as its Geometer: no, He was not. He is. And in Him, the precarious present tense may be seen for what it truly is: the spinning infinitude of all that is Real, the Primum Mobile, resting tangent to the Empyrean, forever and ever, world without end.

Written about a decade ago as a stylistic half-joke, half-experiment. But is it a joke? If every sentence is, is any?

Sunshine was melting down through the trees above, the pure oranges and yellows percolating through leaves and clouds alike, littering the roadside with gently jostling shadows, jostling because of the gently flowing breeze, flowing because of a cold front sweeping down from the north. Suburbia was in all its resplendent glory glowing: the smell of hot tar rising in great waves off the freshly surfaced street (with sharp, perfect rectangles of yellow demarcating the crown of the gleaming asphalt), the glint of stainless steel blazing behind the green of the street signs, the streets themselves named with green—with the verdant names of the trees toppled to erect the streets and structures—the hand-painted “Open” signs scattered amongst the sidewalks and storefront windows (for in this district, an ordinance banning neon signs was in place, for neon was thought to cheapen the community’s image), the quiet, restrained roar of luxury cars whose engines never get out of third gear but which yearn for fifth, much less eighth, and the bustle of mothers and wives trundling from shop to shop, like pilgrims moving from shrine to shrine, worshiping for but a moment at each before passing on to the next.

Suburbia was in all its resplendent glory glowing.

Glowing all the brighter, however, was Gaia. If only her crass tenants were not blind to her effervescent beauty! The lively creek, pouring over rock and mud and grass, the white foam appearing like so many flowing crystals, the deep clear blue like a magnificent tapestry being spun out on the loom of Time. The trees flanking the water were adorned like royalty: purples, pinks, yellows, blues, reds, all quietly floating up and down in the ocean of air, every breeze as if a miniature tide.

Not all of the tenants were blind, however: Gaia felt the lusty gaze of one, a man, a man unaccompanied, a man half-beast and half-angel who felt wholly beastly.

He was young, but by his reckoning, an old soul in a young body. His lover had left him, and with her, she had taken his heart’s flesh. All that remained was a stony organ, calcified over by pain and grief unending. He fancied himself deeply romantic, but not at all a Romantic—he had all sorts of most particular niggles with Romanticism—which made him all the more a Romantic, albeit unwittingly (thus making him the worst sort of Romantic). The situation was less that he had a bone to pick with the world and more that he had a whole host of skeletons to pick with the world. But none with Gaia. Her sweet, succulent flourishment was his singular source of vivacity. He lived for her. But when the time came, would he be ready to die for her?

His languid, slouched walking cut a wandering oblique to the bright and boisterous shops. Why not be physically alone if I am existentially alone, or so his reasoning went; and here, his company was solely Gaia. The street signs were weathered, the tree branches thicker, and the automobiles fewer. He liked this street. Here, he found refuge from the encircling ooze of capitalism, the indefatigable commercial forces, forever bearing down on his beautiful hamlet. Here, the mold of mercantilism was supplanted by actual genuine mold emblazoned like patchwork on the rotting houses of the old former days. Here, romance and love intermingled like the coiled kindling of a campfire. Here, passion burned bright and clean.

At one tree in particular, his torpid travel found abrupt pause: a younger tree, adorned in cherry blossoms, each twinkling out in pinks and whites under the shadow of the massive oak farther off the cracked sidewalk, the paving stones cracked up and down and crosswise in great sweeping angles by the swelling roots of the oak. The rain of recent days had brought out the blossoms, like salt does to meat, and pain, wisdom. He stood dazzled as, in his mind’s scintillations, he beheld the blossoms transfigure into Gaia herself in all her feminine mystery and clarity, the form both blurry and sharp, wispy as smoke but smoke which is lit by flames from behind which are lending form and boundary to the flighty shapes.

After an endless expanse of time—whether five minutes or five days he knew not—a passing car wrenched him from the reverie. Gaia sublimed back into the cherry blossoms, the shadows of the oak flew back into relief, the sun burned back to orange from hallowed clean pure white, and the lifelessly blunt reality of a mere Monday afternoon flooded his senses. He turned on his heel and continued on his ruminative way. Yet Gaia would not so casually lose her suitor! His heart sprang forward with a gulping thrill, pinpricks trickling over his skin and into his bones; a sudden slowing of time’s passage, as if the canal locks had been damaged, or a clog down the line were causing a faucet to choke and gurgle; a heady weightlessness, but not one which like the reverie was entirely in his head. He truly was weightless, and the broken stones beneath his feet were spinning toward him—but so slowly! It was a headlong pivot toward disaster, an acceptance of a black widow’s offer of a dance, the climax of the drama when the leading man is smote down by rank injustice, the end of an era, nay, the end of an epic. His death was upon him.

Yet Gaia condescended, and she spared him, and he was crumpled against the stones, blinking at his hands in front of him, and he had caught himself. His ears were ringing, marginally, off in an unattended alley of his mind; a cool dampness was impressed upon his brow; cherry blossoms stuck off his hands like he were a sapling; his knees ground against the solid stone reality. Was this still the reverie? His mind raced, but like his walking had been, to nowhere in particular. But his dampened brow! He must have been concussed. Yes, he had caught himself, but not soon enough, and his forehead had fallen against the oak-warped stone. That was it. Clambering to his feet, a brief romance flickered through his mind: a lovely lively lonely woman, spying his staggering form from her kitchen, rushing out to give him aid, and looking deep in his eyes like only a woman can, and her being enraptured by his old soul, and her helping him to her house, and her hearth… and herself… and then he slips again, landing on his knees, facing the blossoming tree. Tho’ it were a tree no more, again transfigured, the sunlight again a holy albus, the dancing shadows again elided, the day again unlike any which had come before.

She more resembled now the backlighting fire than the wisps of smoke. Searing anger, a jealous furor, enveloping her shimmering visage. All mystery now gone: her power and might nakedly bared; the blossoms clothed in fiery raiment; the great oak above bending to enshroud him in darkness and expose her to the sheen of Sol; her long flowing hair blazing a sacramental Titian; the depths of his unknown desires plumbed and exposed. She was his love, and his imagined tryst was a blasphemous abomination unto Gaia. Surely this was the end.

As Gaia blazed her most blinding, the rush of awe flooded out of him, and mid-genuflection he looked up to see the stillness of the cherry blossoms, again simply twinkling, simply stars in the delicately undulating galaxy of the oak’s shadow. His forehead was dry; there had been no concussion. Not of the physical sort, at least. His lover had gifted him a concussion of a much greater sort: a concussion of Beauty. Rising to his feet, bewildered, he throws out hopeful glances every which way—perhaps Gaia was still about—perhaps he could yet spy her, see her, be engulfed in her. But she was gone. In the house nearby, he catches the eye of a lovely lively woman, who smiles warmly at him. Only after he has reciprocated does he realize that her husband’s hands had wrapped around her from behind and were now holding her, and she had twirled ’round to complete the embrace, and the smile was never meant for him, and she was not the lonely one, because he was. Was he?

The literally hopeless romantic, the worst sort of Romantic, the sort who denies his own identity: he, even he, had fallen into a Titanic romance. His old soul had found favor with the oldest soul of all, and his young body had been claimed by eternally young blossoms. And so with a sort of hope (although he would never admit to it), he resumed his walking. The strides a little longer, his shoulders a little squarer. He passed from that sacred place, passed the creek with its infinite slight rumblings and whispered wisdoms (for Gaia had now given him ears to hear such things), passed through the pell-mell boisterousness of the marketplace royalty and their loyal subjects, and passed by his past’s outrageous wrenchings and retchings; and by doing so cast his past, his endlessly pretentiously presaging past, at the feet of salvific Gaia.

The kitchen is all spooled up and ready to spring into action, like the pregnant calm of an electric sewing machine waiting for its foot pedal to be actuated. There are grilled sandwiches coming out, all manner of bratwurst, varieties of pork—not a salad in sight. I watch the ethnic delicacies pass me by. They would surely make me dreadfully ill. There is always soy about, lurking, a fly in every ointment save those which I myself make. While I touched not the bread and finer things, I yet could partake of the liquid bread. There was quite a variety. Their names have long since departed my memory, however; this was sufficiently proximate to The End that my memory was yet terribly feeble. I could still barely hear anything out of my right ear.

I had driven a fair distance to get out to this county. I never had an appetite in those days, so I’d eaten no breakfast or lunch. After an hour or so, I think I had downed a couple beers. The alcohol was smoothing out the chronic stress and immiseration of pain and suffering, and my eyes were growing brighter.

Let us call her Catherine. Catherine was standing on my left, which she chose so that I would not be deaf to her. She was happier in those days: her hair, slightly vivider in color, brighter in texture, and with a healthier gravity. Not one nervous tic was in sight, and I knew more than a few of them by that point. To my right, Catherine’s mother; we may call her Ashley. She was glowing—her face, and more importantly, her eyes, aflame with an inexhaustible smile. Others of the family were further down the line to my right. Yet other friends were out in front of us, at a table.

The several young families were predominately occupied with managing their children’s consumption of dinner in as least messy a fashion as possible. The whole affair was rather distended as mealtime durations go, for—as mentioned before—the children were looking all about them, marveling at what was around them. And what was around them?

About fourscore men and women, sourced from at least four different theological traditions, had gathered. The Lutherans were running the show: hence the beer, bratwursts, etc. There were these thin, brightly colored plastic binders floating all over the restaurant, with a pile of them against a back wall, piled up and up, almost up to your nose (and a man’s nose at that—not a child’s). On one end of the dining room, an electronic piano had been pressed into duty. Next to it, a solitary microphone awaited a worthy voice to command it (or, at the least, an MC).

For this was a hymn sing. The binders had been painstakingly assembled, representing the hymnaries of half a dozen denominations. And the children were marveling at the sound of scores of voices boisterously singing all manner of Revivalist, Baptist, Victorian, German, and Genevan hymns. And everything, in parts—always, glorious, parts.

Catherine has a quiet, gentle soprano voice. Its quiet stems not from lack of confidence, but rather indeed, an exceeding competence. She uses her voice for many things and thus must be fiscally prudent with it. Ashley, whom I could not particularly hear, is an alto. Between others in that family and our other friends, every vocal part was accounted for. But Catherine was the only soprano, as I recall.

And so for just over three hours, we sing and sing and sing. Catherine often would get bored of the soprano lines, and she would invent descants for herself. At those times, I often would sail down to the melody line from tenor, or I would glide up into the soprano octave for the same. Or I would ad lib a counterpoint descant to Catherine’s, each of us flitting about in the rafters of our vocal ranges. Other times, Catherine would delicately snatch up the tenor line, but first translating it an octave higher; and I might reciprocate by jumping up onto the alto line, at which time Ashley would contentedly drop down onto the recently abandoned tenor line. When part of my voice would weary from the soprano or alto, I would sink to the bass line and play around down there—especially during some of the Revivalist hymns, whose bass and tenor lines are so hilariously vacant of complexity that one really and truly may pay the score almost no mind, for an entire verse may consist of two notes.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. About an hour in, it was between hymns. Catherine was refreshing herself with her beer; I, mine. And then, as the next hymn began—an old, English splendor—she unconsciously smiled, and cocked her head to the side a little bit, and bladed her body vaguely towards mine, and cracked her neck back and forth a little bit, and said something like, “Paul, I just realized. I don’t even have anything this week. Nothing at all. Paul—” she pauses, putting down the beer, lazily lifting her arms halfway, running her hands through her hair, and sweeping it back over her shoulders, giving it a final rebuke with a backwards flick of her head, and she straightens her shoulders and back, and her body language becomes simultaneously more relaxed and yet more purposed, more disciplined, her knees unlocked with the tiniest jolt, or spring, in them—“Paul, I can really sing, tonight.”

I have been around many, many sopranos in my life. I have heard none like Catherine was on that evening. The glassy, pure tone was set free from all her moderating impulses; and as with all mastery, it was effortless as her whole body conspired to produce this voluminous, mellifluous worship.

An elderly woman near us looks over, jabbing her husband in the elbow, “Wow, look at all them; they’s sure can sing, huh? You catch where they from?” Catherine nudges my left arm, mouthing back to me part of the interrogative woman’s comments with the dancing flickers of a smirk upon her face. I’d never seen her so happy, nor have I since.

A bit later than three hours after we began, the call goes up for what hymn we want next. Somebody calls out a number excitedly. Hearing no contest, the MC goes with it. I get there before Catherine. “Ooh, Catherine, look.” We had just sung it together a few weeks prior under very different circumstances indeed: at a funeral. And—awe of awes, delight of delights—the version in our little binders was the real version: all eleven verses of For All The Saints.

And so we were off singing. The first few verses, unison. So we plow through. At the fourth or fifth verse, it explodes into parts. As each verse ends, fifth, sixth, seventh, the piano dwindles yet more with each verse. Finally, at the end of the eighth verse, the pianist flatly stops playing, unambiguously contending that eight verses was more than enough fun, and everyone falls somewhat into disarrayed silence. My hearing of course is suspect, but for a measure or two of the ninth verse, I heard naught but two sounds: first, my voice, and then, no more than a beat or two later, Catherine carrying on with me. And after four or five measures, with many others now rejoined behind us, the pianist accepted defeat, and continued on. And Catherine and I were laughing and laughing. And the tenth verse comes, and the pianist did not even try to put a stop to it all then.

And finally the eleventh verse in all its glory-charged majesty, and at its conclusion, people were cheering, screaming, hollering, clapping, whistling. I do not much like the limelight, and of course all eyes had been on us for what I pulled with the ninth verse. But: even the pianist was delighted, doubled over laughing, all smiles. Everyone in the room was happier for my imposing my own peculiar, idiosyncratic will upon the room—that is, for refusing the pianist’s will. It’s funny how life is, sometimes.

We are so terribly quick to forget the Great Cloud of Witnesses. We forget the Saints. We forget, largely, all but ourselves. Life was meant, in a very real sense, for a certain sort of wild abandon. That night, as wintry clouds seeped out clutching fog and drizzling rain, a yet Greater Cloud settled over that place. And as the beer flowed, a right, and I dare say, righteous, wild abandon, found its way into the hearts of a people all too prone to never truly live in the flesh. For yes, we are not to be slaves to the flesh, subject to its whims and fancies: but we were, yet, Created in the flesh. The angels cannot taste and see that the Lord is Good: we can. We are to feast and fast, to work and rest, to build and bask, to keep and kiss, to speak and sing.

When we deny such realities—such obligations—that is when the Church begins to falter, to stumble, to crumble. Such discontinuity was, perhaps, at the root of the severance between me and that family. For there are no smiles towards me now; no joy, no beer, no conviviality. There is nothing.

But Someday, in that Cloud—everything shall be made anew. Everything is going to be all right. For in that Cloud, everything already is new. For Time is but a cage whose bars are all too wide to trap the Holy Ghost, and that Dove of Peace goes as He pleases, redeeming the times and pains of mortal men and transforming them into precious jewels, into gemstones for the saints’ crowns.

And so it is that these days, the forecast tends to be cloudy. And, at best, maybe we get some beers along the way: a laugh here or there, a mild chortle, before the prowling lion growls yet again. But Someday—on that Day, when we have all been swept up in that Cloud just as Christ Himself is coming with the clouds—rather than of imported German beers, we shall partake of the Wine of Heaven.

This is to be a series of brief vignettes which reflect on the quiet, mundane moments of life. Mundane comes from the Latin for “world”; mundane needn’t be a negatively charged word. It is simply that which is not ethereal, liminal, supernal, or infernal. It is not bad to be mundane. It is, in fact, quite good, generally speaking.

She turns her head, looking back towards me, chef’s knife in hand, fingers nimbly brushing the diced pepper across the cutting board. Let us call her Martha.

“Oh, Paul, I can take her; she always gets cranky around this time.”

“No no, it’s fine, don’t worry, Martha. I don’t mind.”

The baby is screaming, stretching out her little pink fingers, clenching and unclenching her fists, laboring to wriggle herself out of her swaddle. Her toothless gums are thrust out, her jaw working with a rhythmic tenacity as the shrill sounds pour out without interruption. Her eyes are squinting, and she is trying to squeeze out tears, but she cannot; she is not actually crying. She is just, well, being a baby. Let us call her Portia.

I wander into another room to get away from the squeals of children playing, Portia reposing along the length of my left forearm, her head bobbing against the crook of my elbow. Because she’s on my left side, I can hear the screams pretty clearly. I speak quietly over her.

“Now now, Portia. Come now. You’re going to tire out your nervous system! You see, there are two divisions of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and… so you see, this is why it’s good to drink milk, because the calcium is so vital to your nervous system’s functioning. You see, when nerve cells are transmitting a signal, they use electricity—the flow of electrons!… there are these extracellular channels, and they are flooded with Ca2+ ions, and the electrons skip along the calcium cations, and… but if your body doesn’t have enough calcium, it can pull it out of your bones, and Portia, that’s no good at all, because you see, if your bones become porous, then you have a greater chance…”

In the other room, Martha is gently, and then no longer gently, and now uproariously, laughing, choking on her laughter, gasping for breath, trying to be quiet, but she laughs and laughs. Her husband too is giggling.

“Paul, what on Earth are you talking about? What are you—wait—no. You’ve got to be kidding me. Paul, she’s sleeping?”

“Mmhmm. I hypnotized her with physiology.”

Martha’s face glows. She has known me longer than most of the people I know. Her face glows because, well, really, she’s not that surprised. She has watched other infants who love me as well—hers and others’. And she had watched, only a couple weeks prior, as I sang the screaming Portia to sleep, first with a canticle, then with fragmented verses of Biebl’s Ave Maria. I have hummed symphonies to her, hymns; I have made up melodies on the spot; I have mangled the half-remembered words to old folk songs (like the title of this piece). The babies like the vibration of the adult’s ribcage, I think. But I am no student of developmental biology; I don’t know anything about “pediatric psychology” or whatever they call such things.

I just know that at many times in life, the only way to quiet the pains and terrors of the world is through song.

It’s no different, really, than the funerals which I have attended. I find a surviving family member—a tap on the shoulder, the head turns around, the face, shifting agape: “Paul, you’re—here? You came? How did you—?”

For death is conquered by Love: by the Living yet showing up and refusing to let those who mourn mourn alone. Misery may love company, but Love keeps misery company. It is fitting, then, that an excess of sound—screaming about all manner of distresses—is muted not by hushing, but by a greater depth of Sound.

Some silence is found only in song.

“Wait, Paul. But. Before you leave. You’ve been like a ghost lately. Where have all the jokes gone? Why have you gone quiet? You’re so—withdrawn.”

Eying her office door hanging open, but noting the busy din of business around us [n.b. only one vowel separates “busyness” from “business”], my voice mildly dips in volume, and I told her a parable of sorts.

Consider a person whom others entrust with fears, terrors, with violences they’ve suffered; with fruitless hopes, with grasping wishes. For that is what I am, Mary: I am a black hole. People deposit things into me, and those things simply disappear. I never tell a soul. I hear all, bear all, I render counsel, or even, I simply, quietly, listen. When the eyes glisten with tears, I do not look away, I do not equivocate: I look in the eyes, at the soul therein, and I stay steady. I do not waver. Consider if there are people who render unto such a black hole, say, 15% of the darkness in their lives. After six people, cumulatively, I’ve 90%—90% of an abstraction, sure, but 90% of something. Of what? Perhaps the grief of a suffering human soul? But it’s all by proxy, you see. And what if it is more than six people? Well, we’re over 100% now. And there are more than six people. And of course, I’ve all my own griefs and troubles, few of which are known by, well, anyone.

The numbers begin to get unpleasant. We are at well over 200% of something, whatever the abstraction means. Say that people give me some of their worst: that which they cannot share with “others” without losing face. They need a black hole. Not just a sounding board: oblivion. They need the absorption of their woes with zero leakage. People need spices, right? A little spice goes a long way? So I like to say that I receive the salt and pepper of people’s lives. The special stuff, where a little goes a long way. I want to get a divorce. I wish I were dead. My employer is committing fraud, but I’ll lose my job if I do anything about it and I need the healthcare plan. I think my sister has apostatized. I don’t love my spouse anymore, and I don’t think I ever did. My mother is dying and we are estranged and I don’t know what to do. My best friend falsely accused me of adultery. My brother has abandoned his wife and children for transsexuality. I don’t even remember what hope feels like.

So I like to say that that percentage, whatever it is, is a form of salt. Salt is what makes us human: it is what gives our tears taste. And we, Mary, we Christians, we are called to be the salt of the Earth. And so I bear it. I lap it up: into the black hole it goes. But, Mary, have you ever taken a tablespoon of salt and tossed it into your mouth?

Sometimes, I find my mouth, my soul, dry—with all the water—all the life—adsorbed to the salt. Sometimes, I’ve nothing left. And so I withdraw.

And she stood up, eyes bright with glimmering keenness, and she hugged me, not in that white-collar-super-disincarnation-mediated side hug so common then [much less now], but a real hug, laying her tear-sprinkled face against my shoulder. And a week or so later, the ghost withdrew, the jokes and the words, returned.

Withdrawal is a funny word in contemporary parlance. The doctors talk about withdrawal: it is a psychosomatic condition of elevated physiological stress, a chronic biological insult, resultant from the removal of a substance or substances to which a person’s body has become, in some fashion, biochemically reliant. Withdrawal is something to be avoided if possible, and there are usually step-down protocols for tapering off exposure to a given addictive (“habit-forming,” as they now say) substance. Because withdrawal is not the ideal.

What do the military brass say? Well, withdrawal is akin to a four-letter word. It is failure, it is humiliation, it is retreat. It is the loss of a strategic position which was only taken in the first place by some expenditure of material, men, or both. Rare are the withdrawals which were undone by a later redoubled assault. (The Inchon landing is one such rarity of a redeemed withdrawal.) Withdrawal is just about the opposite of any military ideal.

But withdrawal has a grammatical specificity to it to which few pay any mind. Withdrawal describes a motion, and motion refers to two discrete loci: an origin, and an endpoint. Everyone is quick to consider withdrawal with regard to its origin: a state of addiction, or an indefensible strategic position.

In short, people’s concern lies in the question: withdrawal whence? My concern is rather the opposite: withdrawal hither?

The doctors and the generals see withdrawal as unideal. Very well. That is materialism’s judgment. My judgment is rendered from a very different heuristic. My care lies not with the material, but the liminal.

And my withdrawal is not particularly a withdrawal from anything; it is a withdrawal unto: unto something in particular. Well, three things. If materialism claims withdrawal is not the ideal, I claim: withdrawal may be unto the ideals. There are three, in my mind. They go by different names. You know them, of course. They are Christ: Prophet, Priest, King. As a secular author (Mark Edmundson: Self and Soul, AD 2018) put it, they are: Hero [Warrior], Saint, Thinker. The Trinity obscures it slightly, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; but consider, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

Hero -> Redeemer
Saint -> Sustainer
Thinker -> Creator

For are we not the very images of God? Is not Christ clothed in our flesh, coming down from Heaven that we might, with and by and in Him, be drawn up unto Heaven?

We’ve little difficulty in prattling on about a need for Heroes and Thinkers. It is by Creation and Taking Dominion that we emulate God the Father, the Thinker; it is by Courage and Fortitude that we emulate God the Son, the Hero. But what of the Sustainers? What of, in Edmundson’s language, the Saints? What of the Holy Ghost?

The vast majority of Western Christians outside of the Roman tradition have entirely rejected the idea of Sainthood. I’ve little interest in addressing that rejection here, save mentioning two facts: (1) Western Christianity is now largely predicated by egalitarianism, necessitating that all Christians are equal in office and stature; (2) Sainthood as an idea is predicated by the two words Hierarchy and Distinction (cf. Richard Weaver), necessitating that there is a graduated quality to Saintliness, and that there are distinctions of degree inherent between different people. Sainthood, in whatever form you use the word, implies necessarily that not all Christians manifest equal qualities of faith and works. The two dogmas animating the above two facts, accordingly, are ontologically antithetical.

What has resulted has been a slough of cognitive dissonance. Because, of course, people are still in need of sustaining. They still need Sustainers (Saints). And they still seek them out when things become difficult enough. If pressed, people cannot verbalize how it is they pick out the Sustainers from the madding crowds, for the language therefor has been liquidated into, and by, the aforementioned slough; but their actions speak with the clarity of crystal.

Consider the opening verses of II Kings 4. Elisha, a Prophet of God, walking along, minding his own business—which is to say, God’s business—and a woman calls out to him. She lays a terrorizing crisis before him, and—nothing else. She does not even ask for help: it is an unalloyed cry of despair. Note Elisha’s response, What shall I do for thee? Now remember the words of Christ in John 2, upon his mother saying unto him, “They have no wine”: Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.

In both, the plea for aid is tacit. It is by implication. And in both, the Prophetic office shines out, radiant and clear, as both Prophets bring to bear the abundant riches of Faith into according abundance of material goods. We are quick to brush by the miracles—ah yes, the oil is magically multiplied, ah yes, the water is turned to wine—but this is folly. What is the central act of the Sustainers? They do not work within the bounds of the given crisis; they do not reorganize and reallocate preexisting resources to greater efficiency; they do not reframe the disaster into a more palatable, less terrifying image—no. The act of Sustainment is the manifestation of Greater Power. The Strength which is displayed is possible to glimpse only in the context of desiccating weakness (remember that water—Life—adsorbs to salt). Elisha does not impart his own material wealth of oil to solve the widow’s heartbreak: he pours out that which was, is, and will, never be his own to claim ownership of—the infinity of Heaven. Christ, going much further, too does not impart His own wealth of wine, materially solving the social faux pas, nor does He multiply much wine from little, as did Elisha with oil. No, Christ, seizing the water on hand for ritual cleansing, weaves the water of purity laws into the aqua in excelsis of Heaven’s wine. Elisha, the Prophet, can only Sustain; Christ, the God-man, Sustains the feast by Redeeming the purity laws into the Creation of Paradise’s foretaste. Shall not Paradise be a wedding feast?

Prophets, Saints, Sustainers—they do not solve problems in conventional ways. The problems they face are not mere conventional “problems,” either; they are disasters, horrors, death—they are those terrors which defy all convention. The Prophet is looked to when men are at their weakest: when all the artifice, sophistication, and technique have failed, and nothing remains but quivering mortal weakness. Hear the words of St. Paul in his second epistle to the Corinthians:

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.

For when I am weak, then am I strong. The Prophet, by the alchemical workings of the Holy Ghost, transforms quivering mortal weakness into the strength, into the power, of Christ. For, our God, to our dim eyes of spent light, is a God of paradox: and thus it must be that His Greater Power, His Strength, is made perfect—is manifested perfectly—in weakness. This gift, like so many, is given by means of the Holy Ghost: that Person of the Trinity titled, Sustainer. And so it is fitting that the Prophet, the Sustainer, is in fact but an instrument of The Sustainer, the Holy Ghost.

A constant in every story of the Prophetic office throughout Scripture is withdrawal. The Prophets don’t tend to be very popular, do they? How often do Christ and His disciples withdraw, much less how often does Christ Himself! I pondered for years why this was, and over the years, I cultivated a ramshackle theory. Its radix is, after a fashion, found in Luke 15. Christ tells the parable of a shepherd leaving ninety-nine sheep in the pasture to find the one sheep that has been lost. To make a further abstraction out of the already parabolic language: consider that in the framework Christ lays out, the one sheep has been considered, even if only temporarily, of greater value or import than the ninety-nine. (What might this suggest about the aforementioned dogma of Christian egalitarianism?)

I realized long ago that my place is usually with the weary and tired, the lonesome or the overexerted, of the world. My place is as a healer for the body or spirit, a judge or counselor for the lost and aimless, a displaced force of love and fiery Glory of Life for those in the darkened valleys of this world. Tending to those lost amidst depression, poisons of mind or body; to those who stand above the cliffs and bathe in dizziness; to those whose affairs are grave and shadowed. Then, when the green place is reached, I am ordinarily forgotten and passed from. C’est la vie. There are always more saints laboring in the Church Militant; always more to pray for, always more burdens to bear. The harvest is great but the gatherers are few.

What flickers in the negative space, though? The reality that I go looking for the one sheep versus remaining with the ninety-nine sheep. How could we be so foolish as to presume that the ninety-nine sheep don’t notice when the one is sought after, with them being left in the pasture? It is fertile ground for resentment.

What’s more: why am I ordinarily forgotten and passed from? Well, again, my suspicion is that resentment is in play. I am well acquainted with being discarded at the gates to the green place. So many wounded souls have found themselves in the howling abyss, the sucking void, of the valley of death’s shadow, and then they find me there. None appear to have ever once considered that I appear to have been there before they arrived. And they, with my aid, straggle towards the green place, and they reach the verdant gates to rolling, pastoral hills, and then it happens: I am become a totem of death unto them. They wish to forget the trials, the fire and water, the agony and fear: and I, by some peculiar alchemy, become a totem for all which they wish to forget. And so there is severance. I am cut away.

It has happened many times. The best metaphor for it is in fact itself even true: the romances which I have labored to help and heal and repair, but to whose weddings I ne’er have received invitation.

The ramshackle theory, thus, is that the Prophet—he to whom others flee for aid—becomes an incarnated, walking and talking mausoleum of those memories which both the one and the ninety-nine are desperate to forget. The ninety-nine resent having received less attention than the one, and the one(s) resents being faced with the person whom they stumbled upon in the valley of the shadow of death. I remarked that none appear to have ever considered that I was there [the valley of the shadow of death] before them, but I choose my words carefully: appear to have considered does not mean have considered. It gnaws at the soul, I imagine. For the Prophet to be a channel of God’s Greater Power, he must too then be weak. And what the one sheep knows, if only subconsciously, is that the Prophet was weak, remains weak, and is at peace therewith. But simultaneously, that his dwelling, seemingly, is that selfsame valley of death’s shadow: and that such living quarters must surely necessitate some great degree of strength. And what purer resentment is there than that of another’s perceived greater strength? Perhaps resentment at being faced with an inscrutable paradox?—especially a paradoxical person, one who simultaneously evinces parched weakness and a gushing font of strength? (Perhaps this is why the glaring soprani were silent.) Remember that paradoxes often make us feel foolish, and few enjoy the sensation of folly.

And so, the Prophet sometimes withdraws. Remember that the Prophet, the Sustainer—he is but one glowing fraction of Christ. He may be kingly, but a King he is not; he may be priestly, but a Priest he is not. Christ in His fullness is all three and is at still greater unity with the Trinity Who is all Three. Remember Christ’s words in the Gospel of St. Matthew: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. Why oughtn’t the same estate befall the Prophet? And in our contemporary age, in which exiles and anathemas are rarely effected in a tangible sense, they are nonetheless still effected; and so perhaps a clever prophet might willfully come and go, ebbing and flowing like the tides, having the well-tuned sense of when both the one and the ninety-nine are in concord with their distaste for him. The military brass aren’t wrong, after all: withdrawal is not the ideal—but withdrawal is usually of much greater strategic value than defeat.

Thus, the Prophet withdraws. In Scripture, it’s usually to the wilderness. What is out there in the wilderness? What lurks behind the scrim of withdrawal? A preliminary answer might be, “Whom did Christ meet in the desert after forty days?”

Here endeth the first part. I end as I began, with a story, whose meaning shall be plumbed later. I was fleeing life’s grinding labors for a weekend, visiting faraway friends for respite. I was withdrawing. Hurtling northward on an interstate, a heavy rain getting worse and worse the more northerly I drove. But I knew the road well. When lightning punctuated the nighttime landscape with exclamation points of daytime, everything was as I knew it ought be. All was in its proper place. The road began to drift from due north; I was coming up on the tunnel, and in a moment, I entered its maw. With the suddenness of a storm melting away over open water, all of the sound and fury evaporated. The glow of the tunnel’s aged halogen lamps was gentle and mellow. The black aperture at the opposite end of the tunnel was gradually enlarging, both in diameter and darkness. It was just a few seconds, now, till I was through.

Three seconds. The aperture is very, very dark—it, it is almost black? Where are the lights at the tunnel’s exit?

Two seconds. The air out there seems alive with slight motions, like an old cathode-ray tube television that’s tiring out. Wait—oh, no, no—what if the storm were moving south and got stuck against the mountain’s north side—

One second. The lights are there after all; but they’ve been blotted out by rain. That thunderous sound is not thunder: it is a flood. A rearward glance confirms there is no one behind me: I need room in case I—

Mark. The windshield is instantaneously blotted out by a wall of water, thicker even than that of a Cat. 3 hurricane I once drove amidst. The tachometer skips up and down by the thousands as the wheels lose traction.

Plus one. I feather the gas and clutch, angling westwards, knowing that that is where the pavement bends. There is a steep chasm hugging the east side of the road, and all that stands between me and it—a thin rail—is occluded by the deluge.

Plus two. Twice-downshifted, the car has bled off some speed, despite heading downwards along the sloping plateau onto which the tunnel was built. I know the road, though I see it not. After another thirty yards, just curve back northwards from westwards…

Plus three. I hear myself say aloud, …Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven…; and I realize that I have been speaking aloud for the past four seconds.

Parts II and III shall be linked below upon being published. Part II shall address the wilderness of the Prophetic office. Part III shall return to where Part I began and recast it, or baptize it: which is to say that Part III shall render a theology of black holes.

I learned that my godfather is dead. He was taken up, led by the hand by Angels Glorious into his place amongst so great a Cloud of Witnesses. It was in May of AD 2023. No one told me nor my family. The funeral was in September of the same.

Today, I was sent a link to an unlisted YouTube video of the funeral. And tonight, I watched it. In his church, they called it a celebration of life—but it was a funeral, of course. There was no casket, for he had been buried months prior. But the pastor, a young fellow, maybe early 40s, fought to keep his composure. I was surprised by this. My godfather was in his nineties, after all; how emotionally close could a young pastor have grown to a man twice his age? His congregation is not small, after all.

And so one of the sons steps forward to read his remarks, his remembrances, from a crumpled, tear-flecked sheaf of papers. His accent blazes out in the first sentence: ah, that accent. I have not lived in that grand old part of the United States for decades, now. How I miss the sound of that accent. For it is the sound of home. And in his orderly, Germanic fashion, he keeps his composure; until he does not. It is near the end of his remarks, as is usually the case. He recounted these bounding, countless days of fun: of hikes, lake-swimming, plays, concerts—the music, O, the music!

My godfather was a musician. His life was music. He served in the Navy in wartime, and then returned home, and served families. He was a schoolteacher: he taught children how to sing, how to make music with their hands and lips. He directed bands and orchestras and choirs. He sang in community choirs; he directed community choirs. He built church choirs, singing and directing. He bore three children, who in turn bore twenty-seven grandchildren, and he taught nearly all of them music. Piano, singing, strings, what have you—something musical. He sang until his frail body could no longer navigate choral risers, those despicable contraptions which prey upon even the limber, much less those wisened by years.

When his son lost his composure, it was because of proffering an object lesson. He placed a mature, wilted sunflower next to the lectern of the church. And he remarked, “This is how he was by the end, after all. Hunched over, colorless. But do you see how the flower hasn’t any seeds left? And so it was, with—with…”

Then, the eldest grandchild, now a grown woman, rose to speak. She spoke as well of his abounding love for family and church, of the riches of his teaching, of his care for all those about him. She wept more than the son. And then her face changed, shining like the purest silver, hard as iron.

“But perhaps I never fully knew him until I lived with them, my grandparents, for two years…

I was working then, and I would get up early for all that, of course, but no matter how early I got up, I found he had always been up much longer. He had been reading, and praying—praying for his family, his children, his grandchildren…

And one day, well, for a while, really, I was not doing well. You know, when everything—when—I was very sad. I was not doing well. Things were very difficult…

And I came downstairs, and there he was, having been up long before me (of course). And he began to ask me how I was doing. How I felt. What was going on in my life. And as we began to talk, I felt like he was reading my mind. It was like he could finish my sentences, like he knew what I was going through…

And I learned that he suffered terribly, too. But you could have never known. But he lived under a feeling of profound failure, a fear that perhaps none cared for him…”

Her tear-streaked remarks carried on a little longer, and then, in closing, she read a poem of sorts. She had written it the day he died. I’ll not include it here; but I shall speak of it.

She names countless beautiful things, skills and knowledges, talents and intrigues, of which her grandfather had taught her. Loves which he had given her. “And now, I am you,” she writes. For now she carries all of those, infusing her own family therewith. And she recognized, grasped, held, the Truth: that there are some, some blessed few, who etch upon others’ hearts—not themselves, no, they etch not themselves—but rather, etch beauties and splendors. This slender company, who haven’t only eyes to see and ears to hear, but which give away that which they see, that which they hear. Whose hearts are of such gentle constitution that you may see thereinto; whose lives are stained glass, exposing the heart within, this blinding Light; but the heart is not the Source; O, no. The heart is but as the moon, dear Luna; such a heart is reflective and refractive of that staggering Grandeur of the Light of Lights. We may speak of Greater and Lesser lights, but as to what Light is Greatest: we’ve no debate.

My godfather was no famous man. His funeral was, if the recording is any measure, rather sparsely attended. And a great minority of the attendees were, after all, his many grandchildren.

But there was some day, some suffocatingly hot summer day, those many years ago, when he took upon himself baptismal vows over me. He and I do not share the same name. It is not like with me and my heroic namesake, the titan which is St. Paul. And yet, so many small, flighty details of his family’s words: how striking, how closely they resembled the passage of my own days. How many have written or called me, out of the blue: “Paul, I was thinking about what you said, it was about five years ago, you told me…” How many have, in so many words, said: “Paul, I am you: for you bestowed upon me this love, this discovery, this wonder.”

In the summer of AD 2022, I think it was, I began to make an allusion to Lewis’ Till We Have Faces to a friend, in conversation; and then I cut myself short.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t want to spoil it, because—”

“No no, keep talking, Paul. I’ve read it.”

“Wait, but—when? You’ve no time, and the last time I—”

“I noticed a look in your eyes when you mention it. So I read it.”

There is no plasticity to fate; no flexibility to Providence. The Tapestry is set out in all its Glory, needing only every thread in its place. I was named after a man whom I do not hesitate to term one of the most brilliant and strong-willed men to ever have lived. Do I live up to the faintest drop of his shadow? Likely not. But I try.

And I was baptized under the care of a man who loved ceaselessly and evidently often felt little in return. Or, at least, little enough that despair and anguish still found easy entrance into the cathedrals of his heart. And I am writing this the evening on which is a party thrown by a family who, once dear friends, elected to throw me under the [social] bus due to finding ties with me to be embarrassing or problematic. And I only ever gave them love and care, kindness and sacrifice. Much is given; little, returned. But my godfather knew such dearths too. Do I live up to the faintest note of his music? Likely not. But I try.

Yes, he knew such travails well, and he labored on. Over four-score and ten years was his Earthly labor. And now, the Work which presently fills our Sundays—the Sacred Work of worship and wonder—why, that Work is now the only Work which he knows.

The road is long; the race, arduous. But let us run it with verve and courage. For the Wreaths are not perishable, but imperishable; the Glory, not evanescent, but Eternal.

And so we return to some meditations while I work on larger projects.

Amidst Epiphanytide, my church choir sang this setting of In the Bleak Midwinter. A couple days after Christmas, I inquired whether I could miss the Sunday on which this song was scheduled. The answer? “But Paul, you have the verse 3 solo. We’re doing the piece because we’re hosting a special guest, remember?”

And so we sang. Because of travels, I only made it to one rehearsal before the Sunday morning. And in that rehearsal, my voice was a tenuous, fractured, frail thing. The major sixth from the G of “of” to the E of “milk”: a warped sixth at best. And so on. Several of the soprani turned around, dubiously glaring at me. Of course, they do not care enough to know; they do not care nearly enough to know that I was choking on blood dripping down from my sinuses, down my throat, spattering my voice box with coagulation. A few other people, sensing the need for courtesy, halfheartedly remark, “Oh, Paul, that’s so lovely.”

And the Sunday morning comes. We do a run-through; and my voice is even worse than before. Rather than being an 1/8 step flat here or there, at one point, I am flatly a 1/2 step flat. My voice crackles out on several of the sustained notes. The soprani again rehearse their accusatory glares. No one says anything. Courtesy lies dead upon the chancel floor.

The service begins. We sing the hymns and all the rest; we say the prayers. The offertory comes and goes. I sing the solo in four breaths. As “which adore…” drifts across the nave, the director’s eyes glow, a smile besieging the lips: I trusted you, Paul—and not for naught.

Following the service, the husband of the only non-accusatory soprano tracks me down. “Paul, I—when you started singing, I was straining to see who it was, I didn’t know that—you, I’d, I’d never heard, by itself, just your—it was, it was just so very good.”

My sinuses were bleeding (from my Eustachian tubes, as far as I can tell), the blood taking a forked road—some, down my right nostril; some, down my throat. As I coughed to clear my throat amidst hymns and the rest, I, each time, drew my hand away, checking for blood. To listeners, I sang the solo in four breaths: but it was only three. One of the pauses was only to swallow the cluttering, encroaching sludge in my throat. But none of the listeners knew any of this. What they saw, what they heard, was, as far as I can tell—judging by the many praises and compliments which were laid before me—an unalloyed rendition of that shimmering verse of that shimmering image of Epiphany. None of the glaring soprani spoke a word to me. Does that not say more than any compliment?

As quick as some may be to say otherwise, I write none of this to boast, except insofar as I may boast in weakness. I write this to remark on the idea of Enough for [x].

One of the countless majesties of Epiphany—whose teachings are innumerable—is the tension between merit and satisfaction. Christ, it goes without saying, did not merit the dirt and squalor of the incarnation, of childbirth, of humanity. However, He elected still to be satisfied thereby. He chose satisfaction where merit might shrilly cry, “But no!” For, in His final analysis, if you will, it was Enough. It was Enough for Him because He willed it so, thereby sundering and breaking as upon His knee every axiom of justice, fairness, and “ethics.” For His chosen people, every last needling disrespect and demeaning insult of the human condition was Enough.

But I am no expositor; and so I shall stop the sermon before it becomes one. I, rather, am merely a storyteller, at best, and I often tell stories about myself. This is not because I think I am a particularly interesting subject, but rather because I happen to know more about myself and the contours of my life than anything else. After all, it is my life: or, more accurately, it is that life which has been given to me. My life is not my own, after all. It has been my lot in Providence to have my life torn asunder and plunged into an ocean of novel medical difficulties. And so, I seek to tell worthwhile stories about such an ocean as that.

Oceans are wild, flighty things. Only Our Lord has ever succeeded in calming one, after all. And I have spent much time in combat—combat against drowning in an ocean of psychosomatic malaise—locked in introspective violence over my battered body. It would be so easy to give up, you know. I have stood and sung choral music while tachycardia was wrenching my heart rate to just shy of 200bpm. I have gone to work, countless days, swimming in vertigo, deafening tinnitus, and pain: stabbing pains, aching pains, whatever pains. Many days are, in actuality, these horrific, distended battles. Few around me know, of course. How could they? Those who know I am ill, well, they forget. So, they too often do not know—not really. And to give up would, superficially, be such a respite. When the call for help comes, and I simply respond, “Oh, no, I can’t, I’m sorry. I’m really sick.” Such a respite.

But it would be a lie.

There is too much to do. To languish in agony does nothing to alter or ameliorate the agony. One must act. Yes, I often am swallowing blood while singing. What if I were not singing? Well, the blood would still be there, seeping. I would not be any more well. The only difference would be that there would be no music. And so I sing.

We all, each of us, have been given such grand playbills. We may elect to decline them, to write our own scripts, if you will. But the Pageant is ready and waiting: it needs only the players to present themselves.

And so, it is Enough for me, to seek the good works prepared before me and to do them. The body may heal, or it mayn’t. I don’t know what will happen in that regard. I am better than I was a year ago, which is better than the year before that. Perhaps the thorn shall never fully exit my flesh. Perhaps it shall. That potentiality has no bearing, however, on the good works laid before me. No influence over the playbill. Via free will, there is no ironclad diktat proclaiming, The Show Must Go On. No, it needn’t. I could quit. Anyone could. The good works would simply languish, undone. The Show is not, you see, played by us: it is us.

It is Enough that there are yet labors appointed for me. And I encourage you, for whatever such encouragement may be worth, to not languish, and thereby leave good works to languish undone. The body submits to the mind; the mind, the will; the will, the heart. You must love that which has been given unto you to be Enough.

It is what Christ did at Epiphany. Go and do likewise.

Dear friend,

I want to write you quickly, if only to allay my own rather touchy conscience. You have heard me coughing an awful lot, by now.

But, I write you to assure you that I am not in the least contagious. I am not sick at all—that is, sick with an infection, or infected by anything in particular. And so I cannot make anyone else sick.

So, it is a faux illness. But it is also very much un-faux. I am faring very poorly at present. Insofar as homeopathic medicine tends to remedy brokenness in the body by first exacerbating whatever it is that is symptomatically presenting—well, let the reader understand with regards to my present estate.

If I might, though, I might ask for your prayers. I am very much submerged in the crucible of autoimmune disease (as I have been for just, just shy of two years, now); for some time this year, I was containing, with horridly variable results, admittedly, the symptoms, but I was very sick always. Well, after some reading, and much more praying than reading—I mostly do things by instinct, if we’re honest—I started a cocktail of various herbs and substances. All new. I’d never gone this route before. Therein is the root of my cough: I have been coughing up blood and pus and whatever else from my lungs, where it has laid nestled in noxious rot for these latter years. Therein is the root of my stinging eyes, the searing inflammation in every muscle group. My muscles are wreathed in such fire that I cannot even bend over and clear my knees with the heels of my hands. With every cough, such wreaths of fire only blaze all the hotter, and with sharper clenching pressure. My smell and taste have wandered off. Vertigo is in full swing (pun intended). My sinuses, or Eustachian tubes, incessantly bleeding, which is also much of what elicits coughing. And my jaw is swelling, its range of motion gradually, unflinchingly, contracting. But I have suffered all of this before, and with much more death besides, and so, by God’s Grace, I smile mildly, and choke through the prayers et al., and swim in Romans 12 and Hebrews 12.

My aim was purgative: to strip latent poisons from the crevices into which the body deposits such unsavory things when it doesn’t know what else to do with them. But to strip them out of tissue, they must then drift into the blood: and so they are then given a whirlwind tour of the body on their way to the kidneys and beyond. And so the poison is everywhere; the pain, everywhere.

None of this is intended to arouse pity or sorrow per se. I only wish to be quite frank! It is hard—or, I find it hard—when people have said to me, “Paul, can you pray for me? I have this, err, medical problem.” And then they wander off, so untrusting, or so worshipful of their privacy(?), that they wish to farm out spiritual labor with no care for spiritual candor. Anyway: I don’t want to do that. So I don’t.

At that first-aid training re-upping the other day, I chortled to myself as he described the symptoms of heart attacks. I know them well. I have bouts of tachycardia about biweekly, at this point. “If you ever feel even one of these symptoms coming on, you have to call 911 right away!” Heh. No, everything will be okay. I shall not let slip the mirror dimly from my heart flickering out. No, the stabbing cardiac pain; the BPM soaring just south of 200; no, no, no. Everything will be okay. This is not how it all—how I—will end.

But I would very much like for the tachycardia and all its compatriots to end. So, I am gobbling herbs and suffering the consequences. But perhaps, this is but one last fire, one final crucible; perhaps it is not unlike that last piercing Fire in Purgatorio, as the last violence against Good—lust—is immolated away.

Or, perhaps, nominative determinism shall claim the day, and this jagged, deathly thorn shall remain firmly lodged in my skull, bifurcating the right from the left in all manner of muscles, nerves, and senses.

But you are my friend, and I would treasure your prayers.

I hope and pray you aren’t alarmed by anything. None of this is particularly novel, though. I am very sick, always, and have been for so long. That perhaps you did not always know the gory details does not alter what Reality was, or is. Worry not for me, please. Christ shall not leave unfinished those works which He began. You know some, not all, of my battles, my wars; but you know too of my song. There is yet more to sing.

Blessings always unto you; as ever—
Paul

You have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned
By one who came in the night, it is now dedicated to GOD.
It is now a visible church, one more light set on a hill
In a world confused and dark and disturbed by portents of fear.
And what shall we say of the future? Is one church all we can build?
Or shall the Visible Church go on to conquer the World?
- T.S. Eliot, The Rock

---

No son of mine, I hope,
Is frightened by the sight of fresh-drawn blood.
It’ll soon be time to break him in and train him
In the hard school where his father learnt. My son,
May you be everything your father was,
But less unfortunate. Then you will do well.
I would give much to be in your place now,
Seeing this trouble and not understanding
All that it means. There is no time of life
So happy as the days of innocence
Before you know what joy or sorrow are.
But when you come to know it, then, my son,
See that your enemies know whose son you are.
- Sophocles, Ajax

---

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Break him in and train him, Ajax says. To our postmodern ears and manifold sensitivities (nearly all of which are far too sensitive for our own good), break him in has something of a brutal tinge to it. “What are you getting at, Ajax? That your son is some wild horse to be broken, some wild mustang whose pride has to be flattened?”

Yes, that is exactly it. And we need it at least as much as Ajax’s precious son did. Permit me a quick jaunt into yet another territory in which I am woefully undereducated: that of Greek. The word that unifies everything which has come thus far: πραεῖς, or praus. Our beloved academics very tepidly, weakly translate it: “mild, gentle, meek.” And, of course, technically, they’re not wrong. But what did the Greeks mean—what reality were they seeking to describe, precisely?—by “meek”? Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? No. Oh, no, not at all.

Years before they were ever exposed to combat, horses selected for military service would be taken up and away by the Greeks. Taken up into the mountains, or otherwise sequestered. Then, they were trained. Their pride, and tendencies towards furor, were broken down; they were conditioned to ignore the deafening clatter and shrieks of hand-to-hand combat; they were bathed, as it were, in a crucible of trial and tumult. Of course, not all of the stallions made it. Some, too skittish; some, injured; some, too belligerent, too stubborn.

But what about those that made it through all of the training?

They would come back to the camp, and later on, they would be sent off to war: dressed in shining, sun-splashed armor, their sleek, muscular bodies surging with unrealized kinesis: ready at a moment’s notice for the glories of combat. And in battle, O, in battle—they were terrors to behold. Thundering hooves, pure, single-minded focus on whatever telos their rider had in mind. Nothing could frighten or discomfit them. They were extensions of their masters: unstoppable amplifications of their riders’ intents.

And the Greeks called such horses πραεῖς: meek.

Strength under control. At the beginning, you see the horse play about, basking in his own powers and strength. But then: he begins to run. See how all the geometries of his body shimmer with unity, rhythm, and belonging. He is doing that for which he was Created. There is a term which I created for such visions: existential unity. It is when a creature’s motions and thoughts are in perfect alignment, perfect symmetry, perfect continuity, with what its existence was Created, Authored, to be.

And the music, “girlboss anthem” though it may be, is not beyond my interest either: ... Put my armor on, I’ll show you that I’m unstoppable... I’m invincible...

You realize, of course, that that is what meekness is! Meekness, rightly realized; meekness, to be a channel of God’s Power and Love unto the dim and despairing world! Our armor is the very Care and Providence of God: our invincibility, our security within His Will. Remember my words, that very late night with the melting ice cream—you laughed and laughed, it was such a warm laugh, flooding your face with life and delight—when I insisted that I simply shall not meet my end in a car, on some highway somewhere? That that is not the way I shall die? This is what I mean: to be unstoppable and invincible, forever and forevermore, until we have done every last good work which is set aside for us.

Remember the warhorse, friend. Remember that the gates of hell shall not stand against the Church, which is to say, that the gates shall crumble before the offensive maneuvers of the Church. There is a great war all around us; if only we could see. And you, even you, are fighting a great battle in that war; if only you could see. Remember the warhorse. Remember that you are not your own: that Christ is your Captain. He has Authored you, Created you, into a splendorous work; and He shall not then leave unfinished the work which He began. Meekness: the Expectation that, contra Suicide, there is yet the splendor of the fight which merits the Rage to refuse to give up. I will close with five last words on these four words. Remember the warhorse, friend. Remember who you are. And remember Whose you are. All shall be well; all manner of things shall be made well. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Rage

I don’t quite know what we’re doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Suicide

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                                              Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty draft at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Expectation

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future. I tried to tell her that. Then, after a long silence, she said, “I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived.”
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Meekness

“When,” he asked, “did I ever win a fight in all my life?”...
“It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice....
You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom....
“But this is very foolish,” said the Un-man. “Do you not know who I am?”
“I know what you are,” said Ransom. “Which of them doesn’t matter.”...
Then an experience which perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him—a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred.... The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.... “Get out of my brain! It isn’t yours, I tell you! Get out of it.... In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost...”
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

Finis

It may be that hell is other people, but so is Heaven. Heaven shall be Three People, and we can meet Him now in other people. But here, betwixt Heaven and hell, there is ample space for injury and pain. And as we run this race, we can falter, and fall, and tear tendons, and break bones; and we can get up, but we shall always fall down again.

But it will get better.

[F]or we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
- George Eliot, Middlemarch

---

To be a self is to live toward the future and to do so not only in the form of purposiveness, but also of expectation, anticipation, anxiety, and hope.
- H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self

What a glorious word this is. I do not remember when, precisely, I began thinking of it the way that I do now. But by AD 2019, I had begun to work out what I think it can mean; not what many may think it means, but what it—it itself—could potentially mean. Words are symbols—semiotic operators—and their magnitudes vary from recipient to recipient. Please, receive this, my now four-years-old consideration of this word. Were I not writing this for you under such grave circumstances, I might take the time to reframe, to renovate, my old writing to my contemporary stylistic choices. To rethink some old thoughts, even. But my aim is for this to find you sooner than later. And if not for these grave circumstances, I cannot imagine why I would give you this at all. Funny how the pen of Providence writes, after all.

So: we have levered Rage over the fulcrum of self, thereby passing through the vale of Suicide to the sun-splashed valley beyond. What to do now? Well, new Expectations must be set, framed, established. For expectations are so often the metaphors by which we live, and as we may act fatally thereon, we must get them right. What follows is a letter to two friends/coworkers, whom I sent many dozens of emails titled “Word of the Day,” in which I would discuss, well, a given word per day. I would always close with example sentences.

... [Discussion of my etymology of “expectation”] So we already know ex – “out of,” so what about “pectation”? Well: pectus, pectoris – chest. But, more importantly, it can be rendered as “heart” or “seat of emotion/reason.” The Romans thought of the heart as the seat of emotion and the soul, not the brain (hence our associating the “heart” with love etc.). Now, I originally came upon this putative etymology based on the verb form: expect. For in that context, ex-pect(us) is very easy to glimpse. And it would be a verb form of “out of the heart,” or “from the soul.” And an expectation would thus be that which springs out of the heart, out of the soul.

Should such an etymology bear out, it colors the word with a conspicuous gravity. A tremendous amount of emotion—of trauma and of delight—is wrapped up in expectation. I haven’t fully worked this out, yet, and I may never, but there is some truth hovering out beyond my reach. A close approximation is, “Unexpected things are beautiful.” But it’s not true—it’s incomplete—because unexpected things also compose those worst horrors, those starkest violences, which rend our souls and perforate our psychologies. But it’s partially true. Because if we expect something, does it have the same, the same essence, or efficacy, as the unexpected? If one hears a beautiful, ethereal piece of music, and one is then moved to tears—is it not unexpected? At least a fraction of that lacrimatory movement is due to the unexpected nature of the beauty. If you were to know exactly the emotions an article of reality should arouse from your heart—would it still arouse them? In some cases, of course, yes: if a certain hymn is associated in one’s mind with a funeral, one can, upon thinking of the hymn, know how one shall react if called upon to sing it. But this only further proves my hypothesis: because the gravity, the essence, of those emotions, springs from the association of the funeral, and death is always unexpected. Even when it is most expected, it remains unexpected, for we were not created to experience death. It is foreign to our souls; it is a pathogen, a parasite, an interloper. Death by definition is “out of our souls,” because it is outside of them. Utterly, indelibly outside of them: for our souls cannot die. And so of course deaths are unexpected, for despite all the sin and violence which wells up from us—for there is no health in us—our dim images of God have not the empty space for even the tiny reality of death. Death is too small a thing to fit into the heart of man, for the heart of man was created for Eternity.

And so it is less elegant a phrasing, but perhaps one might posit, “The most beautiful things and the most ravaging things are rarely expected.” And this might explain why some of our deepest pains are over such seemingly trivial things. Because an overwhelming preponderance of our experiences in life are not, as much as we would like to think, prime reality—no, our experiences occur at the intersection of prime reality and our expectations. When one’s friends gather for a party, but the host is one’s enemy, and thus one is not invited, two outcomes are possible: (1) Deep hurt at being ostracized from the group, and (2) Serenity and dispassion in the face of a social snubbing. Now, speaking from experience, I have watched myself incur both. Case 1 occurs when one expects— there’s that word!—to be invited. Prime reality, however, proceeds to not align with the expectation. That which sprung from the soul is smashed to pieces by the unyielding scepter of Reality. An unpleasant metaphor for an unpleasant lot. Case 2 occurs when one expects(!) to not be invited. Suddenly, that which sprung from the soul receives the blessing of Reality. How satisfying—for the instincts of one’s heart to be rewarded by alignment with Reality! There is no surprise, no shock; no beauty, no violence; really, there is effectively nothing. But there is a third case, actually. As well as a fourth. Because what if one is invited? Here, I shall resort to mathematics.

Let us define {-1,1} as the array of outcomes: -1 = not invited; +1 = invited. The distance between -1 and +1 on a number line is two units, right? +1 - (-1) = 2. Let us then define {-1,1} as the array of expectations: -1 = expect to not be invited; +1 = expect to be invited. So let’s look at the possible cases.

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     1.     Expected not to be invited (-1) and was not invited (-1): difference of zero. As I said above, no shock, no beauty—nothing. Correct, but no fun.
     2.     Expected to be invited (+1) and was not invited (-1): difference of two. Expectation was +1, reality was -1: that is a difference of two units in the negative direction. Which aptly describes the smashing-to-pieces I described above.
     3.     Expected to be invited (+1) and was invited (+1): difference of zero. Nothing. Fun, but correct: life as usual.

But now something magical occurs.

     4.     Expected not to be invited (-1) and was invited (+1): difference of two units—in the positive direction. Unexpected beauty. Glorious shock. Joy. Unexpected things are beautiful.

There are other cases I ignored: those with expectation = 0, where 0 would be an indifferent or blasé attitude. But such indifference, if one does the math above, leads to tepid joys or hazy malaise. But by controlling your expectations—by warping and swelling your expectations, scaling them to your environment—one can either: (1) receive no invitation, and be correct, but not hurt; or (2) receive an invitation, be wrong, and be surprised by delight. Of course the insulation isn’t perfect. One might always expect one’s lover to act in certain ways, for instance (to assume based on one’s notion of what a “lover” ought to do in x or y circumstance), and the heartbreak which results from incongruence between the behavior and one’s expectations shall always be a violent mess. But expectations allow us some measure of damage control in the face of a world determined to draw blood. Because what I said earlier is true: there is no space in the human heart for death. But the hearts of some are so small, so shriveled, that death has swallowed them up. And those men, and those women: they wander the Earth with sharp claws, and sharp teeth, and sharpest tongues of all. And they prey upon doves, and they gorge themselves, bones and all. And thus we must be wise as serpents. Off the top of my head... [sic]

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     The solitary tear slipped off her cheek, plunging towards the sofa, breezily
     conceding to gravity’s demands. “But Mother, O Mother, he never—he never...”
     As the water slips into the fabric, her mother quietly comforts her. “We never
     think that we shall be a statistic, darling, but—” as the salt crystals harden,
     microscopic flakes on the—“I never expected, I never, I never, that he would—”
     but the dark spot was shrinking, the water adsorbing to the air—“but dear, the
     whole race of men, they’re all cheating good-for-nothings who—” and no more
     tears came, though her eyes were puffy—“but you’re wrong, Mother. Your
     husband was a good man. And I shall find one like him. Goodbye.” For hope is
     the air which every heart breathes.

Shall we, ever so briefly, return to Kierkegaard? How does one effect the Infinite Resignation, much less then receive all in return via the movement of Faith? Well, I believe that a large part of that is the right channeling of expectations. More Niebuhr:

The God to whom Jesus points is not the commander who gives laws but the doer of small and of mighty deeds, the creator of sparrows and clother of lilies, the ultimate giver of blindness and of sight, the ruler whose rule is hidden in the manifold activities of plural agencies but is yet visible to those who know...”
- H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self

The Expectation, then, might be that God, in His Authorship, has wrought so innumerable a volume of plots and subplots as to leave us utterly bewildered and lost. And thus, what follows in Infinite Resignation?—the discharge of expectations. Let me, friend, put a very fine, even unto sharp, point to this. I have not heard from the _____ for, oh, at least a month. I call them; I text them; I write them; I pray for them. Nothing. That is enough to be very hurtful, but—I simply don’t care. I do care, of course—a great deal!—but I have no expectations. Rather, I expect nothing less: I expect almost nothing, now, from anyone. Because so often, I am met with, or given, or faced with: nothing. And so I expect just that, which is to say, nothing, from most people; and there is contentment there, because my expectations are aligned, clean and smooth, with the hard, jagged edges of reality.

The Expectation towards God? That I shall continue to wither and sear in His crucible. To burn, but not be consumed. [Remember the last fires of Purgatorio; and remember that there were four in the furnace.] I know not why—to what end—my senses were stripped away twenty months ago, why I lost almost every fiber of muscle in my body; why my mind and heart were shattered. But they were, plain and matter-of-fact. It was all there, clear as day, Written—Carved —into Reality’s fabric by the Loving Hand of God. For that Hand was pierced, remember; and the scar remains even now. The Expectation is very difficult to capture, without sounding horrifically cynical, or pessimistic, or, in its extremeness, God-hating or -resenting; but the Expectation is that I may only be a lily, but even lilies are cared for—and not even one lily is consumed by a wildfire’s crackling maw without the Loving Permission of the Father. The Expectation is that I must always cling ever more loosely to that of this world, in exchange for That Which is to come; but the paradox, which Kierkegaard shows, is that in doing so, my clinging to finitude—my care for that which is of this world—shall only further deepen. Because of course, it does hurt to be generally ignored by, well, almost all of my “friends,” until they need or want something from me—but it hurts because I have elected to care about them. The deeper the love, the deeper the possible injuries.

To be torn asunder, in one’s heart and soul, over matters of this world, is not an index of weakness, of carelessness, of poor piety. It is of Love; it is of heeding St. John’s words that we, Little Children, love one another; it is of being given the finitude by means of the Infinite.

But expectations, like all good things, are very hard. It can be best—or, the only thing yet possible—to start small. Very small. Even five minutes. I expect that God shall preserve me even for the next five minutes. And that which sprang for your heart? It shall find alignment in Reality. And on, and on, and on. Slow, trembling steps at first. You shall run again in time, friend.

There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
- Albert Camus, The Fall

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

---

[A]fter having made the movements of infinity, [faith] makes the movements of finitude.
- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

This is, of course, a very dangerous word. Just like its first cousin, divorce, it ought never be even uttered except in the most dire times. I find its etymology—or rather, my self-appointed etymology, as I haven’t a clue of what the “official” one is—a helpful reminder of its true meaning. From Latin: sui-, the genitive form of the third person reflexive pronoun (“his self’s”); -cide, I imagine from caedo, caedere, “to cut.” Hence, suicide is the cutting of oneself out of the tapestry of Providence. It is to elide, to bleach out, one’s colors from the Author’s manuscript—or at least, to attempt to.

In Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy writes what follows. Forgive the lengthy quotation; I have condensed where possible.

Thought Experiment: A new cure for depression:
The only cure for depression is suicide.
This is not meant as a bad joke but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it.

This treatment of depression requires a reversal of the usual therapeutic rationale. The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated.

Suppose you are depressed. You may be mildly or seriously depressed, clinically depressed, or suicidal. What do you usually do? Or what does one do with you? Do nothing or something. If something, what is done is always based on the premise that something is wrong with you and therefore it should be remedied....

Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption.

Assume you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you’d be deranged if you were not depressed....

Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: If you exist, I respectfully return my ticket.

Now notice that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Your only choice was how to be least painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference.

If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and down you will go on the green tapes and that’s the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can’t believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship whose captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick—over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors.

And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the comic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out—or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

The consequences of entertainable suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it....

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.
- Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

What is there to say after all of that? Well, I’ve a few things I wish to say. For one, you, friend, are precious and delightful, and so many—least of which, I—would be unspeakably devastated if you elected the Roman option. But the main point, really? Why, it’s that Percy isn’t recommending the Roman option either. Not really. He has read his Kierkegaard, his Dostoyevsky, his Augustine, his Scriptures. He does not wish for anyone to kill himself. He only wishes for us to realize the freedom we have—the freedom we have in Christ, rightly spoken. We are not slaves to sin and violence and horror. We do, in a really real and true fashion, transcend it, if we but allow Christ’s yoke to take supremacy. For it is always a choice, even when we think it is not. That you continue to fall in the evening and rise in the morning is, truly, volitional. You could end it—all—horror of horrors, yes, but true. And you do not. You do not because, in your spirit, there burns yet some fire, on which you’ve never laid eyes, some fierce blaze of Courage and Love and Beauty and Bravery and Righteousness and—and some know it by its name, the Holy Ghost. It is a Pillar of Fire, holding your hand alway, despite what fires of torture and horror you may bear. It is Love, which bears all things. It is Life, that very same miracle which once swept Lazarus onto his feet.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes of Knights of the Infinite [Resignation]; men who have surrendered all existential cares and concerns to God; and that they are recognizable by how easily they drift through the world, because to them, in a very real sense, nothing matters (nothing that is mundane). But then: but then he writes further: of Knights of Faith. What does Faith do? Faith goes further. Faith seizes God’s claim that those who Seek First the Kingdom shall have the rest added also. Faith is the total and entire inversion of the Knights of the Infinite, for whom nothing matters; to the Knights of Faith, everything matters. Having given everything up in resignation, they then receive the world in return. All is redeemed, bought [at a price], but then it is not kept in the storehouses of Heaven—no, no, it is poured down, back unto His Faithful. Now, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, for as rare as the Knights of the Infinite are, the Knights of Faith are all the more rare. He describes the latter thus:

He finds pleasure in everything, takes part in everything, and every time one sees him participating in something particular, he does it with an assiduousness that marks the worldly man who is attached to such things.... He goes to church. No heavenly gaze or any sign of the incommensurable betrays him; if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the crowd, for at most his hearty and powerful singing of the hymns proves that he has good lungs. In the afternoon, he takes a walk to the woods. He enjoys everything he sees... With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd. And yet, yet—... this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine, and yet he has this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were the surest thing of all. And yet, yet the whole earthly figure he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it, and no one ever suspects anything else. It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it—but this knight does it. Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them the instant they touch and have touched the earth—and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.
- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

And so it may be, dear friend, that, unlike Abraham, about whom Kierkegaard models much of his reasoning in Fear and Trembling, we are not given the command to sacrifice our Isaac; but rather, God simply foregoes the command and translates His Will directly into Creation. And so it may be that we are not asked to resign some fraction of our kingdom; no, that the Kingdom of God, rather than suffereth violence, doeth it, and the resignation is irrespective of our volition.

It may be that we are forced to lose a dear, and good, love.

Towards what end? That is the question. To contemplate suicide, as even Kierkegaard is also writing about—Abraham could have simply killed himself when faced with the Divine imperative of infanticide—to contemplate suicide is to establish the full dominion of our powers. We are less impotent than we think. May I quote myself? This is from AD 2017, to a friend who threw me away during the pandemic. Her name was—is, I suppose—_____. She is a soft materialist and infected with scientism.

In Christian parlance, this “season” in your life is ending. I have grown jaded to that word. I have heard it so many countless times. And so I suggest a new word, one which is a little newer than the word “season,” but one which too has a rich tradition: this chapter is ending.

For if every life is but a story, with God as its resplendent Author, and if all the life and death, every sinner and every stone, are but threads of an enormous coruscating anthology: then do not stories have chapters? Sometimes, the chapters are very long. And they drag on and on, and you start to flip forward through the pages, flicking the slivers of time between your thumb and forefinger, waiting to see what the page number is on which you spy the next bolded number. And that exercise can be what constitutes life: a striving, an existential yearning, towards the future, coming at the expense of flipping past the pages of the present because you need to know when the chapter ends.

But this restlessness is, of course, mere folly. We cannot transport ourselves to the end of a chapter; in fact, our only motile power is to elect the end of our story, spilling blood in order to spill into the Story to come. Nor can we ever wrench ourselves from the threads we inhabit, swooping out over the tapestry to see what textures and harmonies our story is forming with others. No, in the hands of an infinite God, we are in many ways simply one-dimensional beings. We hurtle down this thin black line of Time, and there is nothing but the present. For there is no chapter’s end to peer at—not yet. It has been written, but in the stars, and we have not yet the eyes to see. We know how the story shall end, but never the chapter. We cannot decipher the constellations’ hidden meanings. We are but minuscule points hurtling down the straight and narrow.

How do we cut open that thin black line and divine a method of geometry? For we are to imitate God, and He is the prime Geometer. You know that answer, though—by two different metaphors. The couplets of faith and hope, faith and love, and hope and love—they are mere lines—but faith and hope and love? There shines the bounded area, the triangle, of units squared: there shines an area to cavort in. And of course there is then my metaphor, of the husband and the wife and the life to come therefrom, and the formation thereby of that same healthful, bursting triangle and the cavorting endemic thereto. And when the latter triangle blossoms both from and upon the former, a pyramid is built up and up and up, and from the massing variegation of human existence there springs a perfect cathedral unto Heaven, and the stained glass is human hearts; for those who reflect and refract Christ are but lesser lights which are illumined by the Light, Lux Mundi, and our colors and shapes and images are visible only by the pervading sunlight of Christ’s reign....

And so, _____, I am so thankful for you, and for your present estate, and for your long-borne patient suffering. The placid, noxious death-in-life that sometimes shadows o’er our days just as the lifeless moon eclipses the salubrious sun—it too meets an end. The death-in-life meets death. It crumbles into powerless pieces at the feet of He of Whom it was once written, Fui quod es, eris quod Sum:

As you are, I was; as I Am, you will be.

From glory to Glory, but everything shall be different. The thin veneer we presently tread—this precarious present tense—shall not fully pass away. In the Life to come, everything shall be familiar, but full of so much more. Now, it’s as if we wander darkened streets at night, glimpsing only vague forms and flickering shadows. Then, the light shall be ne’er-ending, and flesh and fullness shall be imputed on the forms and shadows, and everything shall be so familiar, and yet so novel, so exotic, so new. For all shall be made new.

By persevering, by pressing on, by continuing, friend, you are contradicting (Latin: “having said/told against”) suicide. For I hope, by now, you realize that I use the word in a far greater, more sweeping fashion, than does perhaps the DSM-V. And it is only by contradicting suicide that everything else—certainly the Words to follow—becomes possible. I will close this lengthy section with a rather lengthy poem, read aloud once upon a time unto me and others by a very different _____. (And I wish I might have read it aloud to you, friend.) And then I shall say one thing about it, and then we shall be on to greener pastures: that, I promise you.

https://poets.org/poem/suicide [in the manuscript, I rendered the poem here]

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes of repetition, and how God is so much Younger than us that He can perfectly delight in repetition. Every day, the sun rises, not because of “natural laws,” but because God orders it in mirthful delight: “Again!” Every day, as your eyelids flicker open, and the despair comes crashing down upon you: it is yet a new day, filled with tasks that you—that we—mustn’t lay by. Take heart, friend: for there are yet so many good works for you to do. God yet has, in His own way, need of you. There is yet so much beauty which you may impart on His Creation. What the devil, what all his flies and mongrels and imps and minions seek to do, is to cause us to suicide: to cause us to let go of the scripts which we have had given to us, Written for us, by the Author. But we have, all of us, our parts to play: our characters, written—etched—into the exploding hearts of every star of every constellation—the whole of Creation glows with the script. The blocking, the set changes, every act and every line and every costume change: O, friend, if only we could see it!—but our souls should shatter at the heat, the life, of it all. It has all been Written. We need only labor onwards, following the gentle cues of the Helper, our gift from Christ: the Holy Ghost. Der Geist hilft.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean.... When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Not unlike a theatrical play, the arc of these words is sinusoidal. I recommend against reading any of them, particularly the second, without resolving to read the balance of them. While in four parts, it is a single unit of synthesis, of argument—of apology, in the Greek sense.

“There is no possible idea,” Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, “to which the mind of man can’t supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.”
- Charles Williams, War in Heaven

---

The ungodly are froward, even from their mother’s womb; as soon as they are born, they go astray, and speak lies.... Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw- bones of the lions, O LORD.... The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his footsteps in the blood of the ungodly. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous; doubtless there is a God that judgeth the earth.
- Psalm LVIII

Our beginning is, perhaps, in a rather unconventional place. At first blush, the word perhaps brings to mind only the chintzy poetry of Rage, rage against the dying of the light and other such similarly underdeveloped musings. But I believe this is the place to begin. To continue breathing is to continue moving forward: in that sense, we are not so different from the sharks, which must move forward to breathe. But in order to continue moving forward, that is, to continue breathing, we must, as the physicists say, experience an impulse: we must be pushed. The push may come externally or internally, but it is best to have something internal.

In ordinary circumstances, we may find ourselves flush with impulses, positive and negative alike, impelling us merrily on our way. But when the light fades, and the stars are quenched, and home, much less Home, seems an impossibility: all impulses may fade unto nothingness. People often speak of the fight-or-flight instinct, but as with many so-called dichotomies, there is a third option, one little mentioned. It is surrender, or abdication, or resignation; it is laying oneself down and letting death seize its plunder at its leisure. For the spirit may be so crushed that to even flee is too great a task, much less to fight; and so the spirit lets go.

Enter: Rage. Several years ago, I underwent combat arms training with a friend of mine in the Marine Reserves. Frigid winter air, freezing rain; your hands so cold and stiff you could barely move your fingers, much less feel the trigger and smoothly pull it. After one particular drill involving rapid reloads and running between firing positions—with everyone taking these great heaving inhales of the frigid air, some hands here and there bleeding from numb skin having been worn raw against magazine releases etc.—we clustered around some coffee, burning our mouths and huddling together to block out the wind. And one of the instructors started talking about firefights.

“Do you know what the most important thing to do is if you’re in a firefight and one of the fuckers lands a shot on you?”

“Get behind cover and apply pressure?” A student—an RN—gives it a shot.

“Hell no. You already should be in cover, and you don’t do first aid when the bullets are flying. No. If you get hit, there’s only one thing you need to do: get fucking enraged. You need to be furious. You need to decide—absolutely—that this is not the way you die.”

He pauses, surveying the shivering class around him. “If you take a shot in an artery, you’re dead. You’ll last a minute, maybe two, before you bleed out. But you get shot anywhere else, if you’re within twenty minutes of a hospital in the developed world? You’ll be fine. You just need to shoot your way out to get to the damn hospital. See, criminals and scum like that don’t know any better. They watch movies and TV, right? They get shot, and over 80% of them die on the scene from shock alone. They will themselves into dying. If you tell yourself, ‘This is it; this is the end’: you know what your body will do? It’ll give you what you asked for. If you refuse to die, if you refuse to accept that this is the end, guess what: the body will do that too.”

Thus: Rage. I am using the word loosely, of course. I mean it in a violent, initiative-seizing fashion. The choice to act, decisively and boldly, against uncertain, unclear, and importune circumstances. Put another way, when presented with the tension between fight-or-flight-or-surrender, Rage is to, against all odds and defying all opposition, elect fight. Fight till the end. Why, though, you might ask? Why fight? There has to be a reason why, hasn’t there? And this is what the balance of these words shall answer: the Gordian knot which they shall slash into twine. The Rage, you shall see, is not for anything specific: it is precisely because you needn’t fight. It is by recognizing, and embracing—understanding, standing under—the Truth that you could give up, but that, that being the case, you might just as easily not. It is a stubbornness unto itself, but which is then directed unto the Good and True.

Or: call it martyrdom. Remember that the martyr is not he who chooses annihilation, but he who recognizes when he is called thereto. The Rage bubbles up out of acknowledgement that it needn’t, just as the martyr burns up out of acknowledgement that he needn’t. He could have recanted. The Rage is to refuse to recant. It is to say that you ought to be—nay, are—a channel for Something More, and that that Something More is not yet done with you. The Rage of which I speak is not, as rage ordinarily is, defined as against anything in particular. It is a Rage for, well, continuation: for sustaining, for preservation; that the Good and the True shall yet prevail.

“Pray,” the Archdeacon cried out, “pray, in the name of God. They are praying against him tonight.” ...
“Against what shall we pray?” The Duke cried.
“Against nothing,” the Archdeacon said. “Pray that he who made the universe may sustain the universe, that in all things there may be delight in the justice of His will.”
- Charles Williams, War in Heaven

The big house had laid derelict for three generations, sitting atop the hill, battered by wind and rain. The furniture was still hastily covered from the owners’ original departure—they had hastened away in attempts to elude the Spanish flu. (They had hastened in vain.) Dust cluttered the floor, mildew the walls, cobwebs the air. She dropped his hand and strode across the parquet of the foyer, her fingers gently grazing the wall, leaving a trail of exposed paint behind her. She felt the light switch, and noted its looseness—rust and time had had their way with it. Leaning forward, she covered her face with her clean hand and blew, puckering her lips tight and forcing the air out quick and narrow. An explosion of dust followed. She lay her finger on the switch, turned, and, with a playful toss of her head, threw her hair out of her face, and shouted through her grin: “Well, are you ready?” For the wind was making an awful racket. He nodded. She threw the switch—nothing. And then a pop, and the copper in the walls roars to life, and the ghostly shape of the chandelier springs into relief above them, and the tungsten glows hotter and hotter and within a second or two the whole room is aglow. The coruscations bathe the room with half-finished rainbows as the crystals above shudder and tremble from the storm without.

The heart of the house was beating again.

Below is a reproduction and mild elaboration of a story which I extemporaneously told during Eastertide festivities; a story in response to questions of how to structure a homeschool co-op in the setting of a small church. I owe the central idea of Seek First to Søren Kierkegaard’s compact masterpiece, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses.

And you see, if you seek to somehow use, as an evangelistic instrument—as a lever—a homeschool co-op—if you wish to reach the parents through the children, it will never work. Not really. For the moment of decision will come: the kids will age out, right? And then the parents, whom you have been seeking to passively evangelize by means of the children’s education—they will be standing at a crossroads. They will be standing upon the precipice of the precarious present tense: the infinite decision. Do they wish to retain the community their children (not they themselves) found in the church by the proxy of the co-op? Do they wish for the Church? What will they seek? In theory, there is any number of objects after which they might seek. In practice? There is the Kingdom of God, or—a void. The null set, if you will. Ø.

For, the path you are contemplating, this oblique method of evangelization, is not the path towards the Church. Let me tell you that path. Let me show you.

A traveler, a worldweary person, is following the road. Married or not, with a family or in solitude—it is no matter. The pilgrim is, always, on this road, alone. For the earth upon which this road is paved is his heart; and the easier he finds the road, thus the harder the stone of his heart. And he knows that the road should be harder than it is. The ease of this highway nags at his heart. It is an unenunciated terror, so slight as to be waved away, yet stubborner than any other emotion. It is there when he rises, and its flickers play across his eyelids before he sleeps.

And that man, time and time again, may come upon a tree. It is always the same tree, although he does not know it is. He does not know he is going in circles. And this is an unadorned, modest tree, in his eyes; it hasn’t fruit, it hasn’t splendorous blossoms. But, it has shade. And as the wind rustles through her leaves, a faint song is formed, tho’ he mayn’t—or, may!—discern a line or two:

To all who are spiritually weary and seek rest;
     to all who mourn and long for...
     ... wide her doors...
     ... welcome in the name of...

And perhaps the first time, or perhaps the fiftieth time, that the man passes the tree, he casts himself down beneath her boughs, to rest within her shade. He may even sleep; for the first time, he may even truly rest. For despite the ease of the road, he is weary. Depleted. And beneath the shade of this tree, the unenunciated terror retreats. He does not know that that is why he feels better, though. As he wakes, he smells the youth of spring, and he notices that the tree is not unadorned. Strange. He had thought it was. But those are definitely flowers. Thousands, tens of thousands, of little, delicate flowers. And the petals, carried off in great breaths of air, have fallen upon an old footpath etched into the flesh of the Earth, sprinkling pastel beauty on the lesser-taken trail. He follows the path, wondering if others have found it before. “Surely I am the first! Someone would have told me of this if he had found it. What an adventure!”

Rounding a hill, he finds a little country church. He has never been in one. He doesn’t even really know what a church is. It is just a building to him. He tries the front door; it swings open, but not without an aching creak. His eyes adjust from the torrential sunshine to the shaded interior, and the scene is surprisingly unsurprising. There are, at most, half a dozen pews on each side of a central aisle, and a small, cramped chancel at the front, with a weathered altar lit by dwindling candles. On the north and south sides of this quiet, still rectangle are two windows each: clear plate glass. Everything plain and mild. The plaster ceiling is held aloft by wooden beams: a sort of abbreviated A-frame. He thinks that he can see the faint shape of a cross by the altar, but he does not know what that is. Shadows play across the chancel, besides. He turns to leave.

“Friend, don’t go. Not yet. Only for a moment longer: walk with me. Before you continue on the road, before you continue seeking, first seek one thing—with me.”

He turns, with heart aflutter, for no one has ever spoken with such tenderness towards him before. The figure is clothed in red and white, with a warm visage whose features the man could never again remember. And he walks, towards the figure, who is standing, with open hands and smiling face, at the exact geometric center of the church.

It is here, in this humble church, that the center can, indeed, hold. And so it does, while all about it begins to transpose. Where there once were four windows, now there are six, and then eight, and then—; and the plain, clear glass begins to blush with love towards the pilgrim, and rich colors bloom from the crystal planes, and what once were portals to the rocky plains without are now portals to scenes of the Author’s Work within this little church. But it is not so little. Not now.

And as the man walks down that center aisle, it is no longer six pews on each side, but perhaps sixty. But he pays that no mind. And if the man could see through the shooting walls, he should see these magnificent buttresses happily sprouting up along the dilating objects of their embrace, affectionately hugging the newly limber stonework. The ceiling, quietly bending into vaulted heights where there once were cramped wooden joints. Transepts springing out amidst the unfolding buttresses, punctuating the lengthening nave.

At the center, still, the figure. “Yes! Seek this first. The rest will wait. Just this one thing, I ask of you. Seek this a little while. With me.” And the pilgrim continues to walk towards the center.

And at times, of course, he falters, and stops. Pausing, he looks about himself, and wonders, “This is not what it looked like when I entered.” For it is a glorious basilica now. And he may meander here and there, looking at the stained glass, or even beginning to walk back towards the door through which he had entered just a few—minutes? hours?—ago. His progress is fitful. But always, the gentle repetition: “Seek this first.”

And each time he starts to walk away, he gets less close to the door than the previous time. This is not only because of the expanding space. This is because of grace. This is because he is becoming less interested in the rocky plains outside. He is becoming less interested in the highway. He is becoming aware of the incongruous foolishness of having his cake, rather than eating it. Taste and see. “The more I seek this first, the less interesting the rest of it all seems. But I’ll come back ’round to it eventually.”

And after miles of cathedral, he reaches the center of it all, and the figure embraces him, and it is like being held by a pillar of fire. But he does not get burned. But it does burn, for one glittering, blinding instant.

And from the center, the chancel does not seem so far now; the altar not so distant; and the shadows are long gone. It is farther than ever, and yet closer than any could have hoped. The candles are burning bright and full. And the figure takes him by the hand, leading him down the aisle. There is another figure visible, now. He is at the altar. He is dressed in colors for which no language has adequate vocabulary. And the two of them, the pilgrim and the pillar, begin to run, though the former’s feet are so light and his heart so quick that he fails to even notice. The impossibility of the church’s length has long left his mind. Where insipid intellectualism would have needled with sophomoric questions, awe and wonder now flow over him and through him. He is not happy, strictly speaking; he has stumbled through the scrim of happiness, discovering the sun-splashed valley of joy which lay behind it. The curtain was torn, after all.

As they near the chancel, the pilgrim senses great movement behind him, a swell of inertia, the vast kinesis of a million bodies all moving as one, together reaching the finish line of that great footrace; but he does not turn around to see. His eyes are lost in the Light of He at the Head of the Church. His heart is lost in the dancing revelation of Apocalypse. All is becoming Light.

His ears had heard, Seek First, and the implication had been that the highway outside would wait, that he would get back around to it; that after Seeking First [God’s Kingdom], he might Seek Second, Seek Third, etc., other matters; that his life would continue as it had been, but with some amendment, some new attachment. A prefix, if you will. But that is not what happened at all.

It was not a prefix that he had received, here in this strangely expansive, seemingly infinitely capacious little country church. No, he had received a new name. No prefix, nor suffix, could hope to contain the sweeping alchemy through which his spirit had passed. It was nothing short of a rebirth.

Here, in this unremarkable desert, a highway had been made straight for God. Here, in this quiet little parish, a center aisle befitting the celestial Wedding had been constructed, hewn out of the reclaimed, redeemed hearts of man. And here, the pilgrim, himself simultaneously the first to discover the path and one of countless many before—for the path is always unique, for it is always discovered anew—here, the pilgrim alights towards the altar, a member of that great Body presenting herself unto the Groom. The race was run; the battle, won.

Within the flowing walls: the altar, and the chancel, and then the nave, dissolve into Light. For it is not dissolution, but in fact precipitation: but we’ve neither the eyes nor the words for that sacred Material, that elevated Incarnation. And so the Light, in all its spectacular purity, seemingly collapses into a single point, when that point is in fact a constellation of many dimensions, new dimensions, all dancing in perfect worship amidst the Wedding Feast. For the pilgrim was just one of so very many lost coins.

What is within those walls defies our understanding; what is without defies our defiance. Without is that worn footpath, dressed in the splendorous robes of spring; without is that highway, with so countless many trudging along it. But without is one more thing. Without stands a tree, that ugliest beauty which ever was born upon this Earth—for cursed were all upon it. And to those like the pilgrim at his beginning, it is but an embarrassment: ugly, useless, and shameful. But still, and always, that wistful eastern wind, pushing Helios towards his western sleep, filters through the leaves of that tree; and still, and always, that faint song is formed:

 To all who are spiritually weary and seek rest;
     to all who mourn and long for comfort;
     to all who struggle and desire victory;
     to all who sin and need a Savior;
     to all who are strangers and want a home;
     to all who hunger and thirst after righteousness;
     and to all who will come,
     this church opens wide her doors
     and offers welcome in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let us begin with a reiteration, a retreading, from Advent. For I am not through with the geometry of that season.

Here, if you will permit me such playfulness with theology, we might see Time as the x-axis, proceeding right-wise indefinitely, until it is pierced through by the perpendicularity of Christ’s Advent [the y-axis], cleaving the Tapestry of Time, precipitating a Cross, Crux. And then, what’s more, by means of the Second Advent [the z-axis], As Above, So Below—we shall be brought from the low places to the High Place, by means of the indescribable Love, Mercy, Largesse, Condescension, Oblation, of Christ’s sacrifice—with everything centered about a single point in Time and Space and Eternity: the Incarnation of Our Lord.

You know all of this, already—just by different symbols, different metaphors, different language. I proffer nothing you’ve not already in your possession. But my hope, my prayer, is that my peculiar wordings spark in your imagination some new vein of golden thinking.

For our purposes here, note that the axes flow in every direction, and that they have arrows pointing outward. They have beginnings and ends; they point somewhere. They are neither shapeless nor formless. They have beginnings and ends.

Let us consider the double Crux formed by the x-, y-, and z-axes. Let us glimpse these axes as double metaphor: first, in the fashion I described already; second, as members, organs, fractions, of the Church. From the Center, from the Incarnation of Our Lord, radiates all the Church in her variegated glory. It is as though all is pouring outwards, unfolding outwards, unto some infinitude. It is as though all is the petals of a Rose, unfurling at the sight of dew-kissed Dawn, the dew of Baptism, stretching out in perfect union, yet each petal distinct, discrete, and named, although all yet working in unison.

And at the end, The End, when the z-axis shall pierce the Crux, rendering the double Crux, all shall be brought back inwards. He, the King, Jesus Christ, shall draw all things unto Himself. And all shall be made New; and the rose shall contract, and contract, and contract, tightening, hugging its members closer and closer and closer, until all is but Light—a concentrated, singular point of Light, so dense as to be immeasurable, yet so vast and capacious as to be wide and expansive as all the Heavens. And the arrows of the axes, every arrow in Creation, shall be turned point to fletching; for the last shall be first; for all must flow towards the Center; for there shall be no more use of arrowheads, for the swords shall be beaten to plowshares in that time, in that moment when Time is sublimed, melted away with the dross of sin, leaving only Pax et Gaudium.

And then, what shall commence shall be but a realization, a recapitulation, the Consummation, of what came about this very morning, so many years ago. Out of the Light, out of the density of Immovable Love, the Rose opens again, bursting forth in pure White, in the purest Light. Theophanic Eclipse shall not be terrible then, for it shall be all: for the Sun and Moon shall no longer be our lights, but only I AM.

Yea, indeed, it is Easter which fashions the Rose at first. The Crux, with Christ upon the center of it, the Crux which is the intersection of two lines stretching out forever, but forever pointing inwards, pulling all inwards; it is that bloodied Rose, that Rose bruised but not broken, which draws all towards the Center. In our days of blood and water, of Baptism and Wine, the Rose must be scarlet, for it is by His Stripes that we are healed; it is by the water poured from His Side that we are baptized. But He was not content for a lesser bride, for a smaller Church; and so, having been drawn inwards, we are turned, last-to-first, fletching to point, turned outwards again, notched upon the bow of His Mercy, that bow which stretches across the Heavens every time the Earth is baptized by rain; and we are loosed from that Red Rose unto the world, to love the world, to set the world’s eyes towards the Center: to love God, to serve God. And each has his own particular part to play, just as the bow from which we are loosed is itself composed of every possible color; and each is irreplaceable, each is unique, each is named.

For as the first Adam once named everything under his domain, so too has the Second Adam named everyone under His domain. Our eyes, too weak now to read the names, blinded even by the softer Light of the Red Rose of this time; but: amidst the Light of that Pure White Rose, that Light which is to come when time is to come undone: O, we shall, each of us, then read that name etched upon our souls. We shall then pass from Mirrors Dimly—to Faces with bright eyes and untiring hearts. We shall, only then, know ourselves truly. For how can one be known if not by one’s True Name?

In this Rose, in the grandeur of its Totality, as all things flow inwards towards the Center, unto the Center: the Center becomes All. The Center is the Sum of All. How could it be otherwise? For in Latin, is not our LORD’s name—I AM—rendered as: SUM?

We mayn’t yet know our own Names, but we know His. And that is enough.

Be still then, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the nations, and I will be exalted in the earth.

Photo courtesy of birdworld compatriot and Christian brother-in-arms Edward Badgette; see here for the beautiful story behind the rose in the photo:

https://twitter.com/acrimonyand/status/1646666863194062849

     “Yes,” Stanhope said again. “Very. Only—you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say ‘terribly’ I think I mean ‘full of terror’. A dreadful goodness.”
     “I don’t see how goodness can be dreadful,” Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. “If things are good they’re not terrifying, are they?”
     “It was you who said ‘terribly’,” Stanhope reminded her with a smile, “I only agreed.”
     “And if things are terrifying,” Pauline put in, her eyes half-closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, “can they be good?”
     He looked down on her. “Yes, surely,” he said, with more energy. “Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?”
- Charles Williams, Descent into Hell, Chapter I, 1937.

On Monday, March 27, AD 2023, I was absentmindedly eating a late lunch, and I happened to glance at the news: something I rarely do. Breaking news: school shooting. Hmm. And I see that it was a Christian school. Hmm. And so I read on—it was in Tennessee. Hmm. Oh, it was in Nashville? Hmm. No mention of the name of the school. And I read, still yet almost absentmindedly, of how the murderer started in this or that hallway, that this many people were killed, and—and then there’s a break in the article, in the news copy. There’s a video player. It’s paused, sitting on its thumbnail preview. In the foreground is some journalist or whatever; in the background is a residential intersection. But it’s—no, surely, it cannot—no, no, no—

And I hurriedly type a web search: “nashville christian school shooting,” and find another news article. And click on it. And this article has a photograph: a photograph of the school, of the church. And I reflexively close the article without reading even a word. And this is why the journalist was standing by a random residential intersection: because it is an intersection near the driveway of the church in question. Because the church is at the top of a hill; its driveway, a steep, winding cut up the hill. There is nowhere for the media crews to mill about, standing aimlessly, talking about whatever they talk about, except near the base of the hill.

And I know all of this geography—I recognized the residential intersection in the video thumbnail—because I, for a time, attended that church. I walked about the hallways of the first and second floors of the school, because that is where Sunday school was; I drove up that steep driveway; I passed through that intersection. I know all of those spaces, still, as well now as I did when I was there. It, Covenant Presbyterian, was my sole, and soul’s, refuge from working obscene hours in a hospital. It, as a church, was the most splendorous church I ever attended as a visitor. The beauty of the building, the worship, the people’s hospitality, was staggering. For over a decade, my memory has enshrined this precious church, and its precious parochial school, as the platonic ideal of what a Presbyterian church could be.

For around a decade, in the church’s infancy, they rented a space—some ugly gymnasium, something along those lines. And they saved, and saved, and saved. And then: they bought this undeveloped hilltop, hired a classical construction firm, and built a stunning, beautiful stone basilica; flooded it with natural light through stained glass; lavished it with a beautiful pipe organ; and filled it with beautiful stone and tile flooring, oak furnishings, a skilled choir, and so, so many happy families. And they built a school for the families. The pastor was one of the finest I ever sat under. It was this shining citadel of Truth, of Orthodoxy, perched atop a hill overlooking the urban sprawl.

Their sanctuary:
https://www.360cities.net/image/covenant-presbyterian-church-nashville-tennessee-usa

And that platonic ideal church is forever shattered by the reports of intermediate calibers, and the blood and death which stains that hilltop shall never be blotted out, shall never be ameliorated, never redeemed.

I still remember what their school uniforms look like. I can barely remember a single conversation I had even a day ago, so shattered still remains my mind from The End, but I can remember what their school uniform looks like.

On the morning of the next day, Tuesday—after only sleeping two or three hours that night—I awoke, fitfully, to a phone call from a friend. I answer, and what comes through the receiver is not a greeting in return, but the purest sobbing. A beloved friend, a mother, who knew that I knew Covenant Presbyterian. Amidst the tears, her bedraggled words form: “Paul, have you, have you, the people who died, Paul, have you, do you know, have you read—”; “No, ____, I have read nothing”; “Do you want me to tell you? or, or you can read it?”; “Whatever you wish, ____”; “The pastor’s daughter, Paul, I know you so loved the pastor, Paul, she, she was 9, Paul…”

The first comfort, to my friend more than me, in these days of death: the pastor whom I sat under is not now the pastor. No, the pastor there now cannot be the man I worshiped under, for that pastor was not a man who, a decade and some change later, would now have a 9yo. I know nothing of the other victims, the other martyrs, and not accidentally so.

As my friend gathered up some degree of her composure, for she was soon to be gathering up her children to take them to [a Christian] school, she made two comments; and they are why I write this today. First, “Paul, I hate that I am ‘the one who cries’”; second, “Paul, it’s not just that I am so hurt and horrified, I, Paul, O, I feel this, it’s, Paul—this hatred. They are so evil. And I hate them.”

What I said to her in the moment is peculiar to her and thus shall not be rehearsed here. That having been said, I also must addend that this woman is the gentlest, most hospitable, generous, and mild-mannered person you might imagine.

To the first, I say: Jesus wept. Weep with those who weep. It is no weakness to weep over others’ sufferings, others’ martyrdoms, at the hands of evil.

To the second, I say, just as those in the rainbow alphabet soup coalition are so very fond of saying: Love Wins.

An hour or two later after my friend’s phone call awoke me, an old friend of mine texted me out of the blue. Military dude. One of the finest men I’ve met. He didn’t know I knew Covenant Presbyterian. “Sending ******** straight to hell” was the text, and the attachment, bodycam footage from the Nashville PD officers who stopped the shooter. And, consciously absentmindedly, I hit <Play>. I know those hallways, those staircases… And they pass a bulletin board covered with photos of children’s faces, and it’s just like the bulletin boards looked over a decade ago, but with a lot more faces, now. The truly Good things in life do not change, after all: but only grow. And then they step around a twisted body in the hallway.

What struck me, watching that video a single time, only once, once being infinitely enough times, was that I felt nothing of horror or flinching at the pivotal moment: at the moment when she who so weakly lived by the sword died so weakly by the sword. The carbine raised, the corner rounded, safety clicks off, squeeze-squeeze-… etc.; and then the final shots from another, from a pistol, with no safety to click off.

My mourning of what was done to this beloved church (for make no mistake, the church and the school are one, structurally and otherwise) has been at a distance. I do not live anywhere near Nashville. And my empathy and sympathy swell to fill the cavity of loss. But let us not mistake such mourning for weakness. Christ, the strongest man, the truest Man, ever to live: He too mourned. Yet none might plausibly accuse Him of weakness.

One sermon shines most clearly in my memory from my time at Covenant Presbyterian. The pastor was, with no small amount of zeal, commenting upon the feminization of the American Church. He was decrying the gross appeals to pathos, the overly emotional worship music, the elevation of women into roles of the clergy, and the driving away of masculinity from the Church. Using King David as a double type—a type of Masculine Man, and a type of Jesus Christ—the pastor condemned a Church in which strong, hearty, bold, and militant men were being sidelined and eschewed in favor of weak, obsequious acquiescence to cultural rot. He went on and on—like any good Presbyterian sermon, the sermon was over forty minutes long—but it was deft and facile and, most of all, True. As I recall, one of the hymns of that Sunday was Lead On, O King Eternal, with the organ thundering, the choir pouring out its SATB beauty.

Perhaps in the intervening decade, Covenant Presbyterian has slid away from such shining Orthodoxy. I know that many Presbyterians have, although I am also no longer one of them, so I usually pay them little mind. I do not presume to know one way or another; although I do like to think Covenant Presbyterian have stayed True. I simply know what the place was when I was there. It was Good, it was True. Their families, joyful and loving; their church, shimmering with life; their school, well—Beautiful.

By necessity, by very definition, evil is weak; it can only parasitize, it can only prey upon, it can only subvert. Remember, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, that the blessed angel Abdiel passes amidst all of the devil’s encamped army without the slightest threat against him. Remember that evil is weak.

Remember that evil is so overly self-aware, so indescribably self-conscious, that, so absorbed in pride as it is, evil knows not even itself: evil’s is not a well-examined life, to borrow from Socrates (and it is not a life at all—only a death-in-life). Remember that evil does not know what evil does not know, and yet evil does not know that it does not know what it does not know, because evil believes itself to know all. Such faux omniscience is, after all, perhaps the animus of evil. And so as I wrote above: evil, to which Love is incomprehensible, cannot reckon the terror which might readily flow from Love. Love is a terrible Goodness. Many waters cannot quench love.

My friend, articulating that she has a growing hatred: she is not alone. What evil, what those who incarnate evil, cannot begin to imagine, is how much hatred is stored up against them by those who are Good. O yes, they make their pithy taunts, that “Yes, we are coming for your kids, and you can’t stop us,” etc., and they bask in the protections afforded them by the mass media conglomerates et al.; but they have not Love. It is all clanging gongs, meaningless noise; it is nothing. For they have not Love.

I see, increasingly, “threats” from the rainbow alphabet soup coalition, along the lines of, “We’re not going away; you’ll have to kill us,” things of that nature. Hand one of them a battle rifle: he is too weak to shoulder it. Hand one of them a Glock: so weak is she that, upon firing once, the pistol has a failure-to-eject from the slide spring overpowering her wrist. Contrast this with the stories one may read of a young mother who, to save her child, has lifted up a car; or of a soldier who, despite being shot in the head, continues to fight to protect his wounded comrades. Love Wins.

It is to no small extent that I am dancing around stating my exact thesis, as my exact thesis is so blunt, and candid, as to likely violate a ToS agreement somewhere. Allow me to give a dichotomy to speak less indirectly. There may be the most bent man imaginable, so warped and twisted from inviting evil into his soul, into making his hands the instruments of evil. He murders, and he delights in it, savoring the light departing from his victims’ eyes; it is a carnal affair to him. And one day, he elects upon the ruination and undoing of a woman, a wife, a mother. And just as he is beginning his work, he is discovered by another: the husband, the father, a good man. The husband will not hesitate for one moment; indeed, the husband’s very soul compels him towards the antithesis of hesitation. And the husband will feel nothing in that moment: nothing but Love. And the strength which shall flood the husband’s body shall be unto evil as the leading edge of an avalanche unto a dead and rotten tree.

Many, it seems, in the rainbow alphabet soup coalition, have now staked their claim of ideology: that theirs is that which they find worth dying for, much less, worth murdering for. But what they cannot imagine—for they have not Love—is an ideology which one might find to be worth Living for. The adoration of, the affection for, the Love of, Life—in short, Love itself—is of infinitely more strength than their petty murderous impulses. As Martin Luther once wrote (albeit in German), The body they may kill; God’s Truth abideth still.

What evil cannot imagine is that Love fears not death; and this is because what evil—which is death—fears most, is death. What evil fears most is itself. What of the Christian? What of the one enraptured by Love? St. John answers: perfect love casteth out fear.

In the passage of time, it may be, and indeed often is, that Good men must beat plowshares into swords. That some in the Church decry this is shameful and heretical. But let those brave souls, those whose bodies are aflame with Love, take comfort in the teachings of Dante, as commented upon by Dorothy Sayers below [emphases hers].

The innocence thus regained can never be exactly what it would have been if Man had not sinned. God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by its experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense “makes it good”. The sin is not forgotten, either by God or by the soul: it is forgiven, and so made the occasion of a new and still more blessed relationship; redeemed Man is a creature more precious to his Creator than unfallen Man could have been.

Accordingly, in Dante’s Earthly Paradise, the soul has to drink of the twin streams of Lethe and Eunoë. The first destroys all memory of evil and the sin with it; the second restores remembrance of the sin, but only as an historical fact and as the occasion of grace and blessedness.
- Dorothy Sayers, Introduction to her translation of Purgatorio, 1955.

In order to best exercise Love, one may sometimes be called upon—and truly, I mean called upon quite literally and Divinely—to take up horrifying, terrible means, in order to effect the ends of Love. This is the heart of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical. Every man [and woman] shall be brought to account for those actions which were left undone, and those actions which were done. It can be a Higher end to execute the lower means. And the promise suggested by Dante is that all of the sin and wretchedness and horror of one’s life?—it shall be forgotten, and then only remembered, only glimpsed, as threads in the great tapestry of Love, of Providence. Love Wins.

In Psalm 58, David pleads, speaking of those who are evil, that God might Break their teeth… so that [t]he righteous… shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. Many would like to pretend such psalms do not even exist in the Scriptures; of those content to not immediately disavow such violence, so often is the quick rejoinder, “Well, sure, yes, that is the inspired Word of God, but, tut tut—remember that Vengeance is the Lord’s; Christians are to turn the other cheek, to lay down and die.” But there is another path. There is the path of St. Francis. There is the path of praying to be made an instrument of God.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

To those who might argue that this prayer agitates squarely for the lie down and die approach, I shall not tender a response. I think you are wrong: I’ve time for nothing else. The Christian conception of Love is of far grander, more protective, more encompassing, more fatherly, conception than mere, “be nice to people, probably.” Love is the upbuilding, the uplifting, of Life; Love is light against darkness, hope against despair, faith against doubt; Love is giving, Love—

is dying.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

And so, with David, I too cry out: Break their teeth, O God. But let us not be so abjectly faithless as to presume that God, even our God, mightn’t have want of faithful servants in all of His many works, not merely those works we deem pleasant and “nice.”

Love Wins.

We find ourselves at the zenith of Lent. The midway point, the local maximum; and at this height, this dizzying place, we’ve, appointed for us, a rest. Grant us rest, we cry, in the face of dwindling energies, faltering gaits, fragmented minds. And the Calendar concedes: Mothering Sunday. A day of Refreshment, of renewal, of, in a fractional way, resurrection. And just as last week centered upon God as Father, as Parent, so let us now dwell a little longer on His Care amidst this Mothering Sunday.

Why need we such rest? Why are we so bedraggled, so faint, so weary? I suppose that every school of philosophy was, in some way or another, birthed to answer this question. As ever, I leave the philosophers' questions to the philosophers; I am not one of them. I am writing these little missives, for Heaven’s sake, to a menagerie of souls so much more thoroughly drenched in beauty and goodness than mine. Even simply in education—while the classics were being read, or the music was studied (and made), or the art was learned (or created); while higher education, in so many of your midsts, was indeed Higher—Excelsior, catapulting your sensibilities ad astra—I was memorizing the reaction sequences of DNA polymerase. I was learning the periodic table by rote. I was scrawling out pages upon pages of absurd calculus to count electrons bouncing between various quantum levels. How and why does salt affect cells’ ability to metabolize sugars? Why do botulism and tetanus have almost identical pathological biochemistries but result in antonymic symptom clusters? What is ADP phosphorylation and why does it matter? Oh, yes, these are scintillating questions indeed: and I use such knowledge, nowadays, generally to make jokes about (in the case of ADP), say, banned diet drugs from the mid-twentieth century. I am, as ever, not a serious person: I delight in the Real is all. I have charted the dances of electrons about the various rings and chains of nucleotides and fatty acids, and it is all very lovely, but: no knowledge of pi electron orbitals will ever soothe the trembling, tear-stained face. No, no human anguish shall ever be comforted by a thermodynamically precise explanation of electron transport chains, of trans-membrane voltages; no dark night of any soul shall be illumined by a perfectly realized expression of how plants capture light and transform it into pineapples. These are Wonders, yes, to put it infinitely mildly; but they are the roots, the radices, of the props of the play. They are not even the props, much less the play itself. And the play—the Pageant—which is our dwelling place? It is the Real.

Why need we such rest? Because the only constant is change. Because everything is always coming undone. The physicists say, Entropy; I say, death. And so we strain, we reach out, we contract our muscles, the ligaments tug, the bones hum: we strive, we seek, we find. Do we yield? Well, we always do eventually. But on this day, in this week, of Refreshment, let us consider that instant which comes before yielding. Of striving and seeking. Of reaching beyond ourselves. And let us also consider what might the rebuttal of God be to watching us so strain, and injure, ourselves.

Musically, what might this look like? Well, there is a Shepard scale, I suppose; but surely there is a better answer than, well, an auditory parlor trick. There is simple ascent; say, beginning with a tonic, and then jumping up a fifth, and then sliding up to the sixth, and then the seventh, and then—and then hanging, prolonging this tension, dragging out this sensation of unfinished business, of unrealized consummation, and then eventually yielding, and completing the octave. This is not ineffective, certainly. But what if, instead, we went beyond? What if the striving were not seen (or rather, heard) in falling short of the octave? What if, instead, it were seen as an excess of energy, of life, poured out? My cup runneth over? What if the striving, the seeking, were so extraordinary, so super-natural (above/conquering-natural), that it pierced the octave?

What if, for the Christian, a need for Refreshment, for being mothered, comes from days, weeks, decades, of maintaining not a mere common interval—sixth, maybe a minor seventh, even an octave—but further still? A ninth? (By this time, perhaps some of you may guess where I am going.)

With appreciation to none other than ol’ Kierkegaard for the idea, let us live life in the reverse, briefly; for life may only be understood in reverse. There are two settings of this piece of music. We shall begin with the second I encountered (but which is itself, the original form thereof).

Geistliches Lied, by Johannes Brahms.

I chose the video above because it shows the musical score, which I think is necessary to truly apprehend the sheer genius of what Brahms accomplishes. [If you are wondering about what is being sung—if you don’t know German, as I certainly do not—be patient; we shall come to the poetry in time.] Half of Brahms’ scheme is easily parsed, conspicuous as soon as the sopranos and tenors are singing. The melody with which the sopranos enter, the tenors then begin to sing as well, interval for interval, rhythm for rhythm, in a canon—but they are singing it a ninth lower than the sopranos, and eight beats later. Not content with this degree of compositional restriction, constraint, complexity, density, Brahms goes yet further. A measure later, the altos enter, bearing an entirely new melody all for themselves—until, that is, the basses enter, eight beats later, singing the altos’ melody a ninth lower.

And so the piece proceeds along. I know there is bound to be much more to say, but I do not know it. I am but uneducated in such things as musicology, music theory, music anything (and most other things, too). The tapestry of sound, of chords, which Brahms spins out of these four vocal parts is of seeming boundlessness to me. Any element to which you pay more attention, you find more depth, more care, more meaning.

But then: the Amen. I insisted upon having some splendorous Amen within this Lenten series, and this tumbling, soaring majesty has no compare. Here, at the end—and perhaps it is not too unfair of me to say, The End—there is an inversion. Truly, the last are first. The basses, last to enter at the beginning, begin the Amen. If I am not incorrect, the basses begin on the minor seventh of the scale—a tenuous tone indeed. It is a slow, hard line of descent; and the altos, of course, follow it, displaced by a ninth (of course). But as the basses begin a second motif, beginning with a clean octave leap (an ascent is beginning!), and the altos dutifully follow, it is all washed away by the soaring soprano line, with tenors close behind, still yet offset by a ninth, and it is as though the violins sing out above the violas and the celli—soar we now where Christ has led—and everything slowly tumbles into place, all is well, all manner of things are made well—

And the last syllable is closed upon, -men, and—the chord is bent. In the upper three parts, a shimming E♭ I chord [I hope the music theory I learned decades ago is sound!]; but the basses, they had overshot their descent, landing on the major seventh, D, and then slipped even yet further, the D♭. As the choir abdicates, breaking off into a half rest, the organ accompaniment, as if to ensure that the hearer knows that all is not well, lingers again on the D—but this time, it is natural. Maybe there is yet hope? But there is no time to find out—

The choir returns, on a glorious IV chord, and, discontented with that, the tenors and basses trade notes. They remain discontent. The tenors, sitting on a sixth from E♭, settle down onto the major fifth; the basses continue their downward plunge towards the tonic, yet also bifurcating, with some splitting upward—soar we now…—to the tonic above. A glowing E♭ I chord, just as before; but one in which a desiccated D♭ has been torn clean in two, top to bottom, like a certain curtain of old, with two perfect tonics shimmering in the space where before was a bent and broken pitch. Would this end—this End—be as sweet a thing if not for the needling D♭ that is torn in two?

Did not God see the fall of Man as yet a means to only further show His Glory and Goodness?

Let us now briefly consider the German. What are these people singing about? O, Beauty of Beauties:

Let nought afflict thee with grief;
Be calm! As God ordains,
So may my will be contented.

Why take thought for the morrow?
The one God who gives thee
What is thine, watches over all.

In all thy doings be steadfast
And true. What God decrees
Is, and is acknowledged to be, Best.

Amen.

Might this be such a deep and overflowing oasis unto parched lips and pierced hearts! Consider how these are the words being sung upon, over top of, these strained ninths in perfect double canon. The concert of the saints, compounding in mirrored melodies and harmonies, reminding that amidst such striving and seeking, there might yet be calm. That God, even He who clothes the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, has not forgotten you, even you. The morrow, a sophistry: it is not real, but rather, imagined. The grief, a battered memory: it is not real, fully, but rather, aired in the imagination. In all thy doings be steadfast and true: this, this, is the present tense. God’s decrees are: they are not subjunctive, imagined or of the imagination.

The German is, of course, the rebuttal of God of which I spoke earlier. For we are to love and serve each other and Him, and to love is to live in sacrifice—to be a living sacrifice—and that is not a ready state for depraved people. It is not what comes naturally. It depletes us. And besides, one may stumble into a place wherein one gives away much more than one is given in return. Life, dripping away, drop by drop; the blood loss, the exsanguination, of vive, of emotional energy, of willpower, call it what you like: it is a mathematical problem with only one resultant: 0. Nihil. Eventually, the clay jar is empty. There is no more water.

It is this equation which, of course, the Spirit, shatters apart. Der Geist Hilft, pouring clean, clear water into our sundered forms. For one may give away much more than one is given in return: it is true. But given in return may spring out, not from reciprocation, not from human hands, but from the largesse—from the Hands—of God Himself. All the arithmetic in the world is dumb, literally, before the condescensions of such a Giving God. Surely it is more blessed to give than to receive.

Earlier, I cited Kierkegaard, claiming to work in reverse. Let us now close with the fashion in which I first met this towering gem of compactness—the fashion of a dear, beloved friend playing me this recording years ago (the scotch and Cubans no doubt helped solidify, and sweeten, the memory). In speaking of the sopranos and tenors in the Amen, I mentioned violins. What, then, if the organ accompaniment were exploded out into a chorus of strings? In a transposition of form not unlike a cousin to that of Barber’s Adagio for Strings into Agnus Dei, here behold the unassuming choral work transformed into choral and orchestral:

It should be an unspeakably great joy to sing this someday. Perhaps, in Providence, it shall only be Someday, though. Although I hope it to come sooner than that.…

May all of you, scattered about this land as you are, find Rest in this week.

Blessings always,
Paul

Dear friends,

With all due respect to Mr. Handel—who, no doubt, merits quite a lot of respect—one of his works narrowly missed being selected for this week. Instead, by sheer coincidental happenstance, or scintillating Providence, or whatever label for fortuity you elect, our dear Russian Romantic is giving an encore, this time with a much more popular work.

Holy Radiant Light, by Alexander Gretchaninov. See attachment.

If you insist upon a YouTube link, this recording makes me smile at points:

[But truly, I think the attachment much more expressive, yet simultaneously more formal, more archetypal. There are plenty of recordings with fewer mistakes than the attachment, but they all tend to do overly silly things with the tempo in places.]

While the great majority of this song is a wondrous, shimmering continuation of last week’s closing note—that we might find comfort and purpose and joy in singing praise, even evermore; while the wonderful, rich, multi-textured music so often resembles that of a chamber orchestra, of swelling strings, the kinetic texture of vibrato, cavorting chords—my focus here is, rather, on a very small, short little bit of music, near the beginning:

Come we now to the hour of setting sun; the lights of evening round us shine. Holy, holy.

While writing this, I realize that to go where I wish to go with this, I shall have to double up.

See also: Tonight Eternity Alone, by René Clausen (who works in my beloved MN)—a composer who will soon be appearing again:

In truth, I do not even particularly love this song; but I do find it remarkable. Now that I have outed myself as a troglodyte Philistine who sometimes listens to / sings, even, gasp, contemporary choral music, let us continue.

There is no space for fear.

Holy Radiant Light, despite the title (or is it despite?), occurs, narratively, if you will, at nightfall, at a time not ordinarily known for being bathed in light (holy radiant or otherwise). Now, I haven’t read about the bibliography of this work, because I am not a serious person. I prefer to make things up. I suspect, however, that this piece was written for some Orthodox version of Evensong, or a Vigil, or something along those lines. But let us take it at face value: it is a song of worship which transpires at sunset. The lights of evening are shining. There is no explicit mention of The Lesser Light, Luna; rather, just the lights of evening. Clear skies, stars, maybe the moon, maybe not, and no sun.

Here, let us lurch off the path of conventional textual consideration. Let us instead lurch into my possibly nominally schizophrenic consideration, one now five years old, almost to the day. These are not young thoughts.

When panic sets in, when a young child is distressed, when something (as likely imaginary as not) has gone askew, and the crying comes, and the parent kneels down—not on one knee, as though to get up again soon, but on two knees, and the floor is hard—and your arms reach out, and you pluck up the child beneath the shoulders, lifting up, rotating your torso, perhaps ninety degrees, perhaps even one hundred eighty, and then plop the child back down, all the while smiling and soothing him. And his arms thrust out, and possibly his legs too, in protest of the short flight, although all along, it is truly all he wanted. And in this motion, the sky of the child has been completely changed, completely altered. Were there stars in the ceiling above, they should have all been transposed, translated; the constellations should be utterly transformed geometrically. But the child is not looking at the stars, those imagined constellations amidst the ceiling. No, the child is looking at you: the child is looking into your eyes.

And you set about teaching the child something, some kernel of Goodness, or Truth—some fraction of Prime Reality—even if it is only as simple as, “Everything will be okay. I am here.” And the child is looking up at you, for even on your knees, you are towering above the child. And in this moment, for, however long it is, however many minutes, two, ten, twenty, it is all but one Moment—you, the parent, you have eclipsed all. You plucked the child up, rotated into another plane, put him down in a new place, and you have eclipsed—outshone—all else. The toys, or other children, or dog, or spilled food, or whatever other props are scattered upon the stage that is Life—no, that is all gone now, and the stage, tabula rasa, now. There is only soliloquy. Only you.

The lights of evening round us shine. It supposedly was, after all, a fellow countryman of Gretchaninov who penned these words in consideration of such astral arrangements:

The darker the night, the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief, the closer is God!

It is not for nought that the Scriptures so tirelessly testify that God the Father is, indeed, the Father. That, we might say, we have a Heavenly Parent. Of course, to say Father is far better than the bizarrely a-gendered parent, but let me briefly mention a meaning—my meaning—of that little word, parent. As ever, I am not a serious individual, I am making this up; this is not philological advice. Consult with your etymological general practitioner, etc. But: if I am not gravely mistaken, the Latin paro, -are… is accordingly of the first conjugation, rendering the word “parent” to be, if translated literally as written, the active subjunctive present third person plural—they may prepare. For do parents not prepare? Or rather, they are called to; not all do prepare, build up, teach, their children, although they ought (again, the subjunctive). They may prepare, or mayn’t. And of course, does God not prepare us, His Children, for those good works unto which we are called, and for whom they are prepared?

But sometimes, in the wheeling kaleidoscope of Providence, we become distressed. Something has gone askew, and the crying comes. What, in a poetical sense, would it look like, for God the Parent to rehearse what I delineated above? For God to kneel down, to pluck us up, to rotate, to gently place us down, to teach us: would not God eclipse, Utterly and Totally Eclipse, all else? If a human parent may eclipse Earthly things, how much more must the Infinitude of the Father! Whether the sun had set or not would be immaterial, literally, much less metaphorically: the Majesty of God should blot out all of Helios’ light as though it were but a candle amidst a maelstrom. Luna too, utterly eclipsed by the merest Shadow of God. The stars, so dilute in that ocean of boundless, flooding Light of Light as to be salt crystals glittering in the blinding sparkle of sun-splashed seas.

… round us shine. Holy, holy.

God, of course, is Holy; that much is obvious. But in this place, this astronomically displaced dimension of teaching, of eclipse and consolation—are we not, too, holy? To be holy is to be set apart, and can one be more set apart than to have been plucked by the very Hand of God, rotated, placed, etc.? No, to be plunged into the dis/re-placement of theophanic eclipse is a holy estate indeed, even if it be terrible, of terror, terrifying, in a way. And I think it is unfair to say it is anything else. But. While the human instinct is to fear in the face of such impossibly overwhelming, disproportionately affecting Love, the whispered rejoinder? There is no space for fear.

For as vast and immense the cosmos is—much less this darkened, yet blinding, plane of unalloyed Eclipse, where only child and Father, impossibly juxtaposed, face one another—there yet remains no space for fear. Despite seemingly infinite volume, the slightest speck, a mere atom, of fear, is too large a thing to fit. This is why, of course, when we fear, we lose something of ourselves. The only way to make room, to make space, for fear, is to tear off some fraction of ourselves. Fear, the insatiable twin of Pride, the two a Janus inscribed upon the very gates of our hearts.

But let us not move so quickly on past this idea of terribleness, of terror, in the billowing Radiance of Eclipse. When I speak of sanctification, of preparation (there’s parent again), in terms of vulcanization, this is what I mean. To be plopped into the crucible, amidst the molten slag: this is not a pleasant thing. And we may wonder, whatever is God doing? My skin shall boil, my heart shall burst, my bones shall turn to ash. And we look up, and we search for the North Star, or the Southern Cross, or anything by which we might divine a reckoning—but all is Eclipsed! And the sun, he is gone; and the moon, she is gone. Everything, everything, Eclipsed. For Light can reach such an intensity that it blinds, and then all will appear dark.

But the vulcanization passes, of course. Our dross, consumed, leaving behind silver, or gold (or, in my case, perhaps tin). And the Hand, that Piercèd Hand, again reaches out, and plucks us up, and the rotation follows, and we are re-placed. But everything is different now, of course, because we are.

… praising the Son of God! Holy Radiant Light; Praise Thee now and Evermore.

The vulcanization can be long. The Eclipse can seem eternal. What to a child is but two minutes, to the adult perhaps is two years. Purgation is rarely, if ever, painless. But remember what the Earthly parent might say: “Everything will be okay. I am here.” Mightn’t our Heavenly Father say the very same? I AM.

I have run very long, and for that, I apologize. There is much else I might write, but this shall, this must, suffice.

In the Collect for this week, after all, do we not ask, … stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty, to be our defence against all our enemies[?] And perhaps our enemies could at times be so great as to necessitate His Hand covering not only across our faces, but indeed our entire flesh? And would that not, from our limited vantage, appear as nothing but needless Eclipse—when it in fact is precisely that which we, rightly, sought?

Blessings unto you all,
Paul

I suspect that other entries from this Lenten series will not end up here. Perhaps they shall, though. Peace to all of you.

[My husband] watches what you eat when the men’s group meets, by the way. And so does [so-and-so]. They talk about it. I don’t think you have an egg allergy at all. Why do you say you do? It’s not true. Don’t you know people would notice your lying?

[Let’s ignore for now how the two men involved have never spoken to me about this but apparently gossip about it.] Now, to the vast majority of people who associate with me, I am known as someone with no food allergies, who is happy to eat whatever is served. To a few, I have confessed that I tend to get sick when I eat eggs [“Maybe I’m allergic? I dunno,” I say], generally only when the situation has forced me to explain myself (i.e. I have gotten incredibly sick in their presence and they ask me why). Call it a compromise: because technically, most any eggs I eat do make me sick. But—I eat about eight eggs a day: clearly, I am not allergic to eggs. So what gives? Are not all eggs created equal? (Indeed they are not.) And what is this friend talking about, accusing me of lying?

Well, I’m not allergic to eggs. But I am quite allergic (or sensitive, pick a word) to soy, which took a long time to deduce, given that this condition manifested in adulthood. Any egg you buy in a store is from chickens fed almost exclusively soy, meaning that my allergy goes off. Eating soy sets off a thermobaric migraine which, if allowed to fully materialize, resists any [OTC] painkiller under the sun, and which lasts upwards of 28hrs (i.e. however long it takes the inflammatory soy derivative to clear my bloodstream). Sometimes the pain deepens enough that my nervous system resorts to vomiting simply as a distraction.

Why don’t I tell people (save very specific friends, of whom the above is one) that I am allergic to soy? Well, the next time you’re buying groceries, look at the ingredients of anything—everything—you’re buying. You will see the words: CONTAINS: SOY on practically any prepackaged food in the United States. Fair enough, some might say. But Paul, they might then say, I didn’t make this food from a box mix—I made it from scratch. Why won’t you eat it?

Can you imagine my telling people this? It is insanity. The fact that it’s all true doesn’t change that it’s also insanity. And so I simply don’t tell people. I do not want to be that person who requires all cooking and hospitality to revolve around him. In fact, I refuse to be. So, I eat whatever is served, and I wait, and if pain starts, then I gobble aspirin like candy, hoping to defuse the simmering explosion. If I’ve been drinking alcohol, too, then no aspirin: and, well, I pray to be saved. (Which I do anyway.) With those I’ve sufficiently close relationships, of course they generally accommodate my dietary idiosyncrasy, but they do so out of love for me, not out of any demand on my part. That is, of course, the point: that it is love freely given and freely received, not coerced kindness. For instance, when Penelope learned of my soy allergy, she very matter-of-factly remarked, “Well, I was thinking of getting rid of stuff like that anyway, so that’s that settled. I want you to be able to eat anything in our home when you come visit us.” And out went the soy.

The woman quoted above—let’s call her Jackie—knows that it is soy, not eggs. She knows that it is real: she has seen me sick. So why does she say what she says? For it is not a joke, I assure you.

Well, I don’t often presume to understand the psychology of women—but. Yes, there’s that word: but. In this case, I will take a stab at it. This is not a woman who is particularly empathetic. Indeed, I do not know that I have ever seen her exercise any empathy in particular—ever. And I have known her for over a decade. Were she asked this question in isolation, I frankly do not know how she would answer: “Is Paul a good person?” If I had to guess, though, I would lean towards her answer being in the negative. I said “She knows it is real,” but she has a complex theory that every physical hardship I face—up to and including much of The End—was/is pure fantasy on my part. That I imagine such things out of a warped hypochondria. Why does she think this? To take a stab at it,

The synthesis:

1. In the case of The End, she flatly disbelieves that much of what I say happened to me is physically possible. Her basis? Well, who knows. She has an English degree, and she enjoys listening to NPR. She lives in a very small world, spiritually and otherwise. I once put her into a fury by candidly remarking that St. Boniface really and truly existed, really and truly cut down a tree, and really and truly converted a town thereby to Christianity: “That’s just a story, Paul! Of course people wouldn’t die if they touched a tree: that’s not possible! None of that happened! Miracles don’t happen anymore!” So: for me to spend weeks beset upon by demons putting out my senses etc.? Beyond the pale of her world. I had to be imagining, and therefore lying, about The End. She has said as much to my face.

2. In her estimation of me, because she is not particularly empathetic, she thus cannot imagine the sensation of empathy, that I would live in empathy towards others—that I would empathetically wish to avoid placing the onus of allergy sensitivity upon anyone who wishes to love me by showing hospitality towards me.

3. In her estimation of me, it is also impossible that I might wish to avoid placing that onus upon others, because only a good person would do so, and I am not good, and so I couldn’t possibly be that considerate, thoughtful, or—dare I say it—sacrificial.

4. Therefore, the only logical choice left is that Paul is lying about his soy allergy—and because she is a good, virtuous, Christian woman, she is thus empowered to condemn sin in my life and tell me to repent of lying, with a side of persiflage and needling, just for kicks. She loves to assert that I am generally good-for-nothing, a multivariate failure, and then take valiant, heroic stances in larger social contexts, upbraiding me for comedic self-deprecation, attracting the affectionate murmurs of others: Ah, look how she cares so much as to wish him to not self-deprecate! When of course, deprecation is ordinarily her only mode towards me.

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In doing all of this, she is paying a cost. No accusation is free. To accuse is as much to publicly suppose a person is one thing as it is to reveal that you yourself are something as well—something opposed to that thing which the accused supposedly is. In her case, the cost of accusation is her telling me that she believes I would lie about something which not only does not benefit me in any way, but actively, significantly, and continually inconveniences me both socially and financially (the eggs I buy from a farm—eggs that are soy-free—are $8/dozen). Put another way, the cost is her telling me that she has absolutely no idea why people lie.

She has tendered the charge that I am so desperate for special treatment—but only from my closest friends, whom, presumably, I would be most averse to inconveniencing—that I lie about something as oddly specific as an allergy to a hyper-common culinary ingredient. Cui bono? I could go on, but I suspect that I have made my point. The longer I might write about this, or similar costs of accusations, the more such things appear plainly only to condemn their authors, not their objects.

And what did she gain by saying these things to me? Absolutely nothing. She lost several things, but gained nothing. Perhaps she gained a swell in her ego, or whatever other vague, psychological vehicles or vessels others might pontificate upon: but truly, she betrayed how terribly she thinks of me and won absolutely nothing in the process.

Now, as she would well know, Shakespeare once wrote a play titled Measure for Measure. I think it apropos here. Am I proclaiming that you must never accuse others, because the cost is always too high? Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, I am urging you towards careful contemplation as to just what it is of which you seek to accuse another. You shall be judged, measure for measure. Judge not, lest ye be judged: this is not a prohibition against judgment, but a warning against unfounded judgment.

Do I forgive her? Actually, I do. And I will probably forget the particulars of this event within a couple days. My short- and long-term memory formation, post-The End, are severely damaged. But I will not forget the costs she rendered. I will continue, as I have over the years, to trust her less and less and less. She has a barbed tongue and takes pleasure in injuring the hearts of others with it. That is a plain fact, and one which I relay with no amount of emotion or anger. It is simply true.

If you haven’t empathy, read great literature. It will teach you.

If you are not a good person—and no one is, save by the condescension of God alone—seek after God, plead for Christ to free you from the fetters of evil.

And if you cannot, at any given time, either apprehend or comprehend the actions of a person whom the majority of those around you hold up as, at bare minimum, a good person: weigh the costs. Consider just what it is you wish to accuse another of. Remember that the great enemy is called, quite plainly, the accuser. Is your accusation in alignment with Prime Reality? Or are you indulging in violence for the sake of violence? Are you, by accusing, only incarnating the spirit of the author of lies?

If Dostoyevsky is right—and he is—then should you continue on your foolish path, you shall only destroy yourself. Instead of destroying yourself, why not just shut up?

A final note on the two men involved in this episode, too. Without their gossip, none of this would even be possible to write about, because none of it would have happened. If you, as a married man, are happy to indulge in gossip about other men in your church, which you then merrily spread to your wife—a wife known to be acerbic and snide towards the object of your gossip—then you have done nothing but cause your wife to stumble. I don’t blame Jackie, particularly, for being a jerk. She has been that way towards me ever since the day I met her; clearly she likes being this way and is disinterested in changing. I do particularly blame her husband, however, for handing her ammunition, even if, as in this case, it was nothing but squibs.

Count the cost, friends. Count the cost of accusation.

Part II | Spent Light in Marred Eyes

And if I am to die before my time I consider that a gain. Who on earth, alive in the midst of so much grief as I, could fail to find his death a rich reward?
- Sophocles, Antigone (ca. 441 BC)

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If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
- George Eliot, Middlemarch (AD 1871-2)

In the last days of Christmastide, while traveling in the rather languid days of the newborn AD 2023, I was, for a night, devoured by the tempests of a cytokine storm. Now, such storms are not inherently evil; they are, as it were, well-intended by the immune system. However, when the object of the storm is reflexive; when “immune” is prefixed by “auto”; then the storm’s good intentions do little else than pave that idiomatic road towards hell. And so it was with me. Injuries from a decade ago stabbed through with pain; heart rate reaching nearly 180bpm; cardiac inflammation, diaphragmatic cramping, pulmonary ache; my head, wreathed in roiling pain—and of course, only the right side of my head; the dull pounding of the ear crescendoing with the exploding heart rate; vomiting ceaselessly (painful when abdominal muscles are cramping), interspersed with choking on the aforementioned albumen sludge which was filling up my throat; an abdomen so swollen with inflammation that it was distended by about 4"; and the greatest suffering, prowling like a lion in the dark, but never achieving more than prowling. Much of this I have felt before, of course, from “ordinary” cytokine cascades, one of the body’s nuclear options against pathogenic attack (e.g. food poisoning can solicit many of these reactions). But the hemispheric wreath of pain about the head? The cardiac inflammation? The stabbing of old injuries? The flood of albumen sludge?

A long time ago, I was sitting in BIOL 101, listening to the professor talk about plant seeds. I don’t particularly remember much of what she said in that lecture, save her response to a student’s question. She had just finished describing an extracellular signaling cascade by which the various components of the seed communicated with one another that it was time to “plant,” to manufacture and shoot out roots and begin to, well, turn into a plant. And a girl asks the question: “But how does the seed know which way is down? So, like, the roots don’t grow sideways or up or whatever. How do the roots know how to grow down?”

The answer: “Oh, there are proteins that sense the gravitational direction.”
The follow-up: “Uh, how on Earth do they do that?”
The candid last word: “Yeah, so, we don’t really know.”

A thought experiment: the human form, the image of God, which is the form of Christ, Logos made Flesh—human physiology, and, even for argument’s sake, just only a sliver thereof, the immune system: might it be more, or less, complex, than a bean?

Years ago, Penelope worked in an Ivy League research lab. Years before that, we studied organic chemistry together in undergrad. She is no stranger to literature, either research or clinical (much less the English and American fictional varieties). And so what Penelope did, in the face of the encroaching blackness of the blood, was make the rather reasonable judgment that that which was demonstrably clinically efficacious in India, all across the continent of Africa, and most of South America—to say nothing of its scattered use in the United States—was worth a shot in my exotic case. With no firm diagnosis to go off of—my symptom cluster was as yet totally absent from any and all literature either of us had found—it was a blind leap: she asked me to work up dosage parameters, and she overnighted me a volume of Ivermectin (IVM) to match those parameters. Neither of us particularly believed that I had a WT SARS2 infection; the symptoms were all wrong. After all, the symptom clusters of SARS2 were well established by that time. And my plight was, after all, according to medical literature, utterly novel. But, for the explosion of such novel symptoms to intersect, coincidentally, by sheer dumb luck, in lackadaisical happenstance, with an epoch entirely revolving around a novel infection and, more specifically, the novel therapies therefor, was simply too much novelty to bear. Maybe not for a materialist, as most in the medical industrial complex are—but Christians are not meant to be materialists.

A few hours after what I recall was the second dose of IVM—so around twenty-six hours after I started—my midday Excedrin overdose was fading. The quite unpleasant sensation of my ear rhythmically squeezing up the sludge through the ear canal, not unlike regurgitation if it could be slowed down to taking minutes at a time, began its recapitulation. The pulsatile pain began to crescendo. The eyes seared—all was as “normal,” which is to say, as novel, as ever. I plucked myself from my perch atop the bed, from sitting up against the wall, and trundled to the kitchen table, steadying myself on every wall along the way. As I unscrewed the lid and began to upturn the Excedrin bottle into my hand, I froze, cocking my head with, as ever, befuddlement.

The pulsatile pain, the stabbing, the chef’s knife through the skull: it was gone. Not dampened, not moderated, not milder: just gone. In less than a minute, it had simply melted away. Yes, of course, much pain still persisted. But it was a very different pain. A dead pain, not a lively, sparkling, vivid pain. Just aching, punctuated by rare flailing stabbings. The tinnitus, too, had drifted into about mf from what had squarely been ff. The eyes, while still sliding in and out of focus, were only sore now—not searing.

The next day, the blackness in the blood was gone. The sludge continued out of my ear, but no longer with the grotesque squeezing motion of the ear canal. It was draining, now; it was no longer extruding. Within a day or two, I could lay my head down. I could lie down. When I would sleep, the ear would drain, indelibly staining whatever it touched. But eventually, it too stopped. The greatest suffering began, ever so very, very slowly, to dissipate. The hearing loss—for, amidst the tinnitus, my right ear had also all but lost all sense of hearing (I could snap my fingers an inch from my ear and hear nothing)—too began to, very slowly, dissipate.

Just after completing my course of IVM, so about ten days later, I did encounter and fall victim to what was putatively WT SARS2. And in my shattered state—beginning to heal, yes, but hardly healed—I persevered for several days before I accepted Penelope’s offer of yet more IVM. As before, after about 26h, the IVM took effect: and the coughing paroxysms, wretched inflammation, mildly damaged smell and taste, etc., all melted away within two or three days. And again, I was back to where I was the first time I found healing: a place of instantaneous acute relief, relief so astoundingly indiscriminate, so extravagant, so totalizing, that my befuddlement perhaps reached its apex in this time.

But, like an unfinished project which lingers in the basement a little too long, and soon is only languishing, the healing, well, faded from view. That which the IVM could, and did, halt, it could not undo. For whatever IVM’s powers are, anti-inflammatory and antagonistic towards SARS2 pathology though they be, tissue regeneration is not one of those powers. And I’ve read the glib factoids, much less the biology textbooks: “When you lose brain cells, they don’t come back”; “Hearing damage is permanent, because the cells are too fragile to be repaired”; “Nerve damage is often irreparable"; “Diminished eyesight simply does not return.”

Yes, that’s what “they” say, those delightfully generic, unnamed third-person plural entities around which so much of contemporary life revolves. “They” say an awful lot these days. And they said, in short, that my body—that I—was totaled. I undoubtedly felt that way, of course. But feelings, like our memories, are flighty at best. And so, despite what they had to say, I had a question: What if there were something, or someone, that could make death into a beginning? O, the materialists, they have a ready answer, of course; and they shall set it as the cornerstone of their estate in hell. Let them, well, go to hell, as it were. For they are there already, and already discontent with its cramped accommodations, and so they have set about building it upon the Earth.

The human body is a wonderful thing. The human body is a splendiferous thing. Splendiferous, splendi- + -ferous, I have to imagine, with the latter arising from the Latin: fero, ferre, tuli, latus - to bear, to carry. (Remarkable, the things that I unearth in this shattered mind.) The human body is a splendor-bearing thing. The human body is a wondrous thing. Full feeling returned to my face. Most hearing has, by this time, returned to my right ear. Its clarity and acuity remain damaged, and the tinnitus hums along at mp or so—rendering that ear largely useless in musical and conversational contexts—but it is several quantum leaps removed from where it was in January AD 2022. My eyesight is ever so slowly equilibrating, but it requires an enormous amount of blood sugar to function well. I could explain why, but I am content to simply remark that the human body is a wonderful thing. My shattered mind is, day by day, slowly being rebuilt. T.S. Eliot’s 1934 play The Rock comes to mind:

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech

And so it is in my mind, cluttered with wreckage though it be. The debris of half-toppled suppositions is being carted away, the scattered, crumpled turrets of long-forgotten ideological foibles swept aside to clear the site for—well, for what, I know not. You would have to inquire with the Architect. Does the clay interrogate its Shaper? And it has been over a year, and progress on this front often seems scant, and I suppose I look like a fool much of the time. I start sentences, forgetting their ends; I end sentences, forgetting their starts. I begin jokes, forgetting their middles; and when God is feeling particularly comedic, all of these coincide with my mishearing what someone said in the first place. In a sweeping rhetorical flourish, the air dripping with a drama-charged pregnant pause, I might stop in the middle of a sentence: but my audience will likely be left expecting for some time. The pause is fallow. I am staring into a mental void, realizing that I have forgotten how grammar works and, more problematically, what I was even saying. To combat such tenuous cognition, I eventually ended up with two doses of caffeine daily, 100-250mg apiece. They each buy me a few hours of something resembling mental acuity. I like to call it cognitive redlining. As the name suggests, however, it is not sustainable for long periods of time. And besides, irrespective of caffeine levels, I sunset rather severely, making it difficult to hold my thoughts in order too long after dark without extraordinary exertion of willpower (blood sugar, basically). Intriguingly, the sunsetting is combated by dear old ethyl alcohol. The vive of alcohol helps to clear away the mists which settle over the mental wasteland come evening. Unfortunately, alcohol is rather inflammatory, and so I do not partake very often. When I can strike the balance, equilibrating the stimulants and the depressants, I am left feeling approximately “normal,” or what I think normal might be. For I do not really remember at this point what “normal” was, much less is. I do not remember much of what health feels like at all, actually.

In addition to the duet of caffeine and alcohol, my body, which is to say I, have had many other helpers in the latter year of diminishment. To satisfy the curiosity some no doubt are harboring, they are, in rough order of significance: direct sunlight, N-acetylcysteine, black cumin seed oil, niacin (which has the lovely effect of turning the skin bright red, and which is almost certainly what preserved my senses of taste and smell), Mg, melatonin (a potent anti-inflammatory), turmeric, raw honey, raw dairy, quercetin (with Cu/Zn), fulvic acid, ashwagandha, glycine, ginger root, zeolite, milk thistle, elderberry, and undoubtedly others that are not coming to mind at present (I am writing this at night, after all). Via this battery of helpers and other dietary considerations, I have only gotten sick twice in the past year. “But Paul, you’ve been sick much more than that!” I have been ill, yes, but not with foreign infections. I contracted some silly little respiratory thing in October for about a week, and I did again in December, for about three days. Everything else has been autoimmune or otherwise connected to The End. Some rather mock me for being sickly all the time these days. Fair enough: I am just a fool, and perhaps fools ought only to be laughed at. But via the above array, I very rarely was actually infected by anything (only twice in a year with significantly compromised immune function is not half bad). That my constitution is upended might be somehow inherently funny, but it doesn’t strike me as such.

Years ago, before every little flicker of sickness became comparable in social horror to the bubonic plague, I’d a practice of visiting sick families and friends. I rather fell into it. There would be plans for a dinner party, or a New Year’s party, or whatever else, and then the phone call would come:

“Oh, Paul, the kids had this awful flu thing, and they only just got better. We’re canceling. You can’t come or you’ll get sick!”
“Ah, interesting, but you’re not preoccupied with caring for them? They’re feeling a little better? Would you like to see me?”
“Well of course; we would love to have you but you might get sick and—”
“No, I don’t think I will get sick, and if I do, that will be fine too. See you soon!”

I got sick once, from doing this countless times; I had a bad cold for a couple days. Even into 2020, I persisted in this practice. Visiting people who had self-quarantined because of PCR test results or whatever other reasons—mere exposure to someone who had been exposed to someone who had, according to the grapevine, tested twice and gotten one positive and one negative, et al.; and in a way, it was even easier then:

“But Paul, you can’t come visit me! You might catch corona!”
“Ah, well, I doubt it, and it also doesn’t matter because it is more important that you not suffer alone.”
“But you can’t, you might miss work! Or you might spread it to someone!”
“Do remember that no one will bear to even see or host me; how could I give it to anyone? Who could I spread it to? And besides, I work remotely—who cares if I miss some work.”
“Paul, I can’t ask you to—”
“You’re not asking me, and neither am I asking you. I’ll bring materials and make us some cocktails.”

O yes, I lost a few friendships over such “antics” (as they were perceived to be). People talk, after all. Perhaps even then, I was presaging the fool into which The End would transmogrify me; but I was quite simply and simplemindedly attempting to, well, be Christian. I am nothing if not simpleminded to say this, of course, but if that word is Christ- + -ian, “like or of Christ,” and Christ spent His days milling about the leper colonies, I suppose the charge is that I dimly jumped to too logical a conclusion from the available possibilities.

But—I remember the eyes of those tired, lonely friends when I visited them. Theirs were not marred eyes of spent light. They—and not only their eyes, but their faces, their bodies—were aflame with Light.

And so, Light. It is time to recapitulate Part I | The End of the Beginning. The picture I chose therein was that of lights shining in the darkness. However, the head, or the theme, which I chose for Part I was death. But if to decapitate is to remove a head, what if to recapitulate is to appoint a new head, to crown a new theme? What if it is like unto a grafting, like being given a new family tree? And so let us baptize The End of the Beginning, grafting it into a new framework. In the closing section thereof, I highlighted the closing lines of its epigraph [emphasis mine]:

When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

I then veered off into speaking about death, ends, means, etc. But I knew that we would come back to this place. What the lights incarnated unto my marred eyes was the Inexorable Fact that the game had not stopped—not yet. Yes, Thanatos was very much present, but the darkness was not. There was yet Light. The long day had not yet melted away into twilight. Even death could not stop the game—the Pageant, the Masque, the Liturgy of Life—which coruscates all about us, at all times, in all places. The glory of which ever shines upon us.

I have hitherto refrained from musical allusion in A Death Observed, but we are long past the death now [n.b. as in all my writings about music, my hope and assumption is that the reader listens thereto before continuing]. All Creation shimmers with song—as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. And, plopped upon my bed though I was for those delirium-drenched days and nights of spiritual oblivion, this work often drifted through my head. And so did the memory of a ragtag group of us, many years ago, on a windswept winter day in Manhattan, singing this on a dirty street corner to pass the time. We fell apart a bit here and there, and especially at the climax, because there weren’t enough voices to cover the parts—but I am ahead of myself. In the second stanza, Aquinas writes (rather, the published translation renders): Taste and touch and vision, to discern thee fail; faith that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.

Now, this line had a rather piquant glint in my dulled mind, because I rather dispassionately persisted in thinking to myself, “All fine and good, taste and touch and vision are all but gone from me now anyway—but hearing is gone most of all, so that veil is looking a tad impenetrable presently.” But while I knew the rest of the poem, I of course could not hear it—not really hear it, not Behold it, not Understand—not stand under—it. For I was deaf. But I would get out the score and look at it, reading it. Conjuring the sounds in my head as best I could. But it was not until I got it out today, weighing if I would include a photograph of it here, that I saw the words: As at first.

For this is the fulcrum of it all. In the previous verse, the English text has ended on a rather dry, creedal note, and the music is coming off of a dwindling series of ritardando, repetition, and fermata. But. But then, the sopranos do not cut off. Their final two words, thou art, pierce the gaping void between verses. And, even more gloriously, this piercing is not unprecedented; the tenors and basses attempted the very same, mere seconds prior, aided by the crown of the women’s unenunciated vowels. But that chord was askew; it was only an end—never a beginning. And so the choir tries again, this time built upon the men’s vowels, with the women now bearing witness. But here, here at the end, unlike the first attempt, the other parts die off. Their numbered beats flower, and then fade. And the sopranos, alone, calmly and quietly shine, adorning that brief fraction of Eternity—of uncountable Time composed of unaccounted beats—with the shimmering major third of E♭ major, our key hitherto. For thou art—I Am—likewise yet Shines in Infinite Perpetuity.

Then: As at first—is now, and ever shall be, world without end—the soprano G yet shining, and then, all about her, a G major chord explodes into existence, the tempo quickens, a rapid crescendo begins, and Time itself is collapsed inward by the music. While some of the tenors sing the poem: Wondrous revelation, verity and grace; other parts chant, Wondrous light, wondrous light. Then the sopranos seize the next line, Lo, in glory’s heaven I see thee face to face; and only they sing that melodic wonder, floating above the growing roaring chorus beneath them of quicker and quicker chants of Wondrous light, wondrous light, for there is no more Time, not anymore, for the clean and methodical passing of poetry between vocal parts as in the prior stanzas, for Time has come undone, and in the Splendor of Infinite Perpetuity, all is tumbling joy, and then—Light of endless light whom heaven and earth adore, begun before the basses even have time to finish their chant, but they do catch up in the end, and All is Light and Radiance.

As at first. The opening lines of the poem: Jesus I adore thee, Word of truth and grace; Who in glory shineth light upon our race. In my thoughtless delirium, I had latched upon the words, Taste and touch and vision…, and I had forgotten that which came before. I, drowning in The End of the Beginning, had misplaced both The Beginning of the Beginning—Jesus, Logos, Word of truth and grace—and The End of the End—Radiant Light Evermore, Lo in glory’s heaven I see thee face to face, Light of endless Light whom heaven and earth adore.

And yet, the lights. These little hanging strings of lights, quietly shimmering and dancing, utterly unconcerned with the world around them. They had not forgotten. They misplaced nothing. They pointed, quietly and faithfully, to the Light. Jesus I adore thee… who in glory shineth light upon our race… Light of endless light whom heaven and earth adore. Note too how the poem translates the first-person singular into all of Heaven and Earth.

I did not entirely miss the mark, though. Taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail; faith that comes by hearing pierces through the veil. Be so kind, please, as to remember what I wrote in Part II’s closing about the visitors’ words: but their spells’ veil had been rent asunder by His Word [“Not yet”] in a fashion not unlike a certain curtain of old. I then went on to indicate that that Word marked the first recapitulation of the misplaced Concept of Hope. Now let me show you the second.

Throughout the balance of The End, during all of Advent AD 2021 and beyond (and before), Penelope was crushed beneath postpartum depression. She was adrift in storms of insomnia, physical exhaustion, spiritual depletion, and—well, I needn’t define it. Unlike my exotic idiosyncrasies, hers was a more conventional plight. She and her family live a good distance from me, and we never saw each other during my time of crisis. However, the Authorship of God needn’t geographic proximity in order to speedily work. As I labored, in fits and bursts, towards healing, post-IVM, post-SARS2 infection; as I began to assess the damages, much less consider how to repair them—if repair were even possible—I came to know the unknown loss: I came to sense the spiritual hollowing which had transpired. The thought did not then occur to me that perhaps it was, in a small, quiet way, a hallowing, as well. As I began to realize how much had been lost—as the blissful unknowledge alchemically devolved, like gold to lead, into painful knowledge—I realized I did not know how to fix it. I did not know how to even begin. How does one begin to reconstruct humanity, to rekindle emotional and spiritual sensitivity? Surely yes, God transforms hearts of stone into hearts of flesh; but what if your heart appeared to disappear entirely, only to then reappear, but in a different shape than before? The one sensation of which I had both extant and intimate knowledge was suffering. I knew pain well by this time. And so, rather than divine how to begin to feel human again, I took another road. And, beholding Penelope from afar, seeing her testify to praying ceaselessly for my healing amidst sleepless nights of insomniac malaise, I pled to God the Father: take her cup and pass it unto me. I heard nothing—which is to say, I did not hear anything resembling, Not yet.

I shall not attempt to delineate the howling dark that followed. I’ve no desire to etch an image of that peculiarly feminine depression which was poured into my soul, that depression born out of the mixing of blood and water of mother and child, of root and seed, of labor and love. Women would tell me I did it no justice; men would tell me I am insane; and both, no doubt, already are in agreement on that latter point. And I still remember Penelope excitedly writing me one day, exclaiming that the night before, she had slept through the night, that all the clouds of hurt and noxious, inarticulate anxiety had melted away out of the blue. And I smiled a wan smile. The cup, though, did not find full satisfaction in me. It, after a time, returned to her, and lingered for no small number of days after. Like a game of ping-pong, she and I would pass the cup between us; for I did eventually let slip to her my prayer. And later, of course, she got around to reading the book from which I got the idea in the first place: Charles Williams’ splendorous Descent into Hell. Therein, Williams resurrects a doctrine of the early Church: that which he calls substituted love. He takes the, to my sensibilities, very plain and sensible approach, of interpreting St. Paul’s imperative that we bear one another’s burdens to mean just that: bearing them. Not just praying for people, or giving them a casserole dinner, or sending them a postcard with Thomas Kinkade’s effusive palette practically oozing off the card stock—no, bearing the burden, lifting it off of their arched and failing back, hoisting it upon ours, and literally bearing it. Now, I recognize that this is, to many, possibly an idea so absurd as to be beyond the pale. Luckily for you, I haven’t the least interest in attempting to prove anything to you. I am, herein, simply a storyteller: or, to be more precise, a witness. And witnesses, being already in possession of the Truth themselves, needn’t defend it; for the Truth, being a lion, is more than capable of defending itself (St. Augustine).

This infusion of another’s pain—and such illimitably foreign pain at that—poured fire down from Heaven upon the waterlogged wreckage of my soul, and the fire consumed all: the wreckage, the water, everything, and New Life, Vita Nova, blazed out in radiance, star after star precipitating from the sublimating waters, and the constellation they formed is called Love, for many waters cannot quench Love. And I remembered Kierkegaard’s assertion that the Christian must fully, wholly love the world and all that is therein; but that in order to love the world, the Christian must first entirely abdicate the world and all that is therein—to effect Infinite Resignation—for only thereby could the Father then return everything that had been lost, tenfold over. And I realized that the unknown loss had been, in a sense, the loss, or abdication, of everything; and I realized that the meteoric advent of fire in my heart was, in turn, the return of what had been swept away by the waters of anguish. O but how much more besides had been returned! A richness, a depth, a gravity, of empathy, of emotion, of knowledge, and, I dare hope and perchance to dream, wisdom. As in the epigraph from Middlemarch, I had fallen into that roar which lies on the other side of silence; but rather than die from hearing the roar, it was by dying that I was given the ears to hear that roar of coruscating, variegated Life.

However, some may find it untoward or uncomely that I, upon being delivered from the worst of The End, then immediately prayed to be deposited again into mire. Let us thus baptize Part II | Spent Light in Marred Eyes.

Throughout the period of, as I put it earlier, being dead, this modest, plain hymn rang out in the vacant halls of my mind. I had no emotional connection to it any longer, of course; I simply had the intellectual and sensory memories of having this memorized, of singing it in a quiet little small town’s choir. Memories of the soprano who would, at the close of the third verse, with the tenors’ glowing counterpoint dwindling away, turn her head to catch my eye, hers sparkling with warm delight. Fear not: I shall not launch into another idiosyncratic analysis of the music. Of all that I wish to comment on, I shall elect only two sections. First, the penultimate line of the hymn, So to my God I yield me; I highlight it here only to remark that it shall be addressed further on. Second, the opening of the third verse: What God ordains is always good: Though I the cup am drinking // Which savors now of bitterness, I take it without shrinking. Was it untoward and uncomely to seek out Penelope’s cup before my own was even empty? Perhaps that argument could be made, although the rebuttal could be made that mine shall never be empty until In Paradisum Deducunt Me Angeli. I do not care about arguments. The bitterness of the cup, not unlike the thorn of St. Paul, is but a sign of that grand Truth: My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Better to be a weakened instrument of God’s Peace than a strong and empty vessel. Better to love at great loss than to linger in perfect safety. Better to be a living sacrifice than an undying Narcissus. Better to drink the cup. Does not Christ offer Himself through a cup?

By my reckoning, there are at this point at least two fully-grown African elephants in the room, contentedly traipsing about, wondering when anyone will ask after them. Like Solomon, let us cut the metaphorical baby in half. I will comment in part on both elephants: one by explication, and one by implication. On September 27, AD 2022, ten months after The End, I wrote the following to some friends:

I started to go deaf again in the mangled ear. It happened so quickly. The pain is growing; some inflammation in the jaw, too, I think. The pressure compounding. Eye wants to shut. Please, if I may so trouble you, pray that the nightmare does not recapitulate. I am so weary.

You see, The End happened not once but twice. The second time, however, by means of either prayer or physiology or both—for the means were only vehicles of The Spirit anyway—The End was ended before it could begin. Encroaching, stalking death was dragged out of the shadows and put to death. The second time, The End lasted only a night. The second time also elucidated much of what the first time perhaps was.

I live in a house built as two apartments: a first floor, and a second floor. The forced air heating is all on one thermostat, all on the same shared ductwork. The air which is pushed into the second floor, where I live, is intermingled with air directly from the living spaces of the first floor. There are no air filters of any kind between the two floors: it is simply open ducting. And September 27 (AD 2022) was either the day after, or the very day, on which the heat in the house was turned on for the cold season.

Now, thus far, I have been careful to note that my symptom cluster was novel, exotic, unprecedented, etc. And that is, to the best of my knowledge, true; but note the grammar: it is true that the cluster was novel when I was, say, gobbling overdoses of painkillers. I have never said that the symptoms remained novel. Because they did not. By, oh, July, perhaps, AD 2022, there was a turning. And I began to find medical literature, clinical reporting, that matched subsets of the hell through which I had passed and, to an extent, continue to. Virtually all of the literature was published in other nations, such as Italy. There are two germane qualities of this literature, and only two, which I shall take time here to point out. One, the strangest of the symptoms (e.g. certain peculiarities of the tinnitus I have, and other disorders of the nervous system) were manifesting exclusively amongst those who had received immunization injections against SARS2; in those cases, painstaking statistical work had been done to show that WT SARS2 did not produce those symptoms. Only the injections did. Two, some of my more debilitating symptoms were appearing almost exclusively in autopsy reports. The patients, despite hospitalization and all of the interventions implied thereby, were all dead.

To those two qualities I have pointed out, I append two facts, neither of which is likely surprising: One, I am not dead. This, I trust, is not surprising. Two, I never received any SARS2 injection, much less even a single SARS2 test.

Contrary to popular belief, viruses are fragile things. People often conflate them with bacteria, because bacterial infection, viral infection, infection infection infection, it’s all basically the same, they make you sick, etc.; but this is not the case. Bacteria, especially bacteria such as Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, are incredibly robust. Once they sporulate, they are capable of resisting radioactivity, much less wild temperature swings, the passage of thousands of years, isopropyl alcohol, etc. Many viruses, conversely, disintegrate in direct sunlight. Alcohol shatters their structure. They are fragile, for their design is not to linger in the environment, but rather to pass from host to host, expediently and efficiently. Sure, some can linger on some surfaces for some number of days, but compare “a few days” with B. anthracis’ “hundreds of thousands of days.”

Let us return to my ductwork commentary from before. Thought experiment: let us pretend that WT SARS2 were somehow capable of incurring a symptom cluster on me which medical literature has flatly proclaimed can only arise from the SARS2 shots alone. Then, let us imagine that on September 27 (AD 2022), when my world began to violently contract into nothingness yet again, it was because the reactivation of the furnace had expelled lingering WT SARS2 from the ductwork, allowing it to penetrate my sinuses and Eustachian tubes and, well, play it again, Sam. Fun thought experiment, but SARS2 is far too fragile a virus to persist for over a hundred days in the ductwork. Contention: “maybe your neighbors coincidentally had SARS2 in late September, Paul, and when they turned the heat on, … etc.?” Fun contention, but I was around them several times during this period, and they were perfectly healthy.

Second thought experiment: let us do the first experiment again, but this time substituting November 20, AD 2021 for the date. Well, my neighbors were not sick with SARS2 then, either. And while this second thought experiment does not necessitate WT SARS2 particles to persist through ten dozen days of environmental exposure in ductwork, it still does not resolve how said particles could have conferred symptom clusters which WT SARS2 cannot confer. Besides, the first time The End happened, my neighbors were gone. Or rather, to be quite specific: they had left that very first day, on November 21. They had left to go visit extended family whom they had not seen for quite some time (due to SARS2 concerns) and generally trundle about for Thanksgiving etc. All well and good. If I am not mistaken, it was the practice of many, many Americans in the fall of AD 2021 to get the SARS2 shots out of either concern for their elderly relatives (or themselves) or due to direct mandates from employers. It is not beyond the pale, then, to imagine that just before departing, my neighbors had partaken of that therapeutic route. After all, at least one of them works for an organization which, if I am not mistaken, had an employee mandate for the shots at that time anyway.

How, the reader asks, does any of this change the outcome of the thought experiments? How could material from the injection make its way into the ductwork, up a story, and into Paul’s home? Well, it’s been tidily established that those who have gotten the injection can “shed,” or slough off, the SARS2 spike proteins which the mRNA shots direct one’s cells to manufacture, well, billions of; and if such shedding were to occur via the medium of exhaled aerosols, the spike proteins would be as conducive to airborne transmission as any other common virus. To those who would dispute shedding, I would quietly reply that for many, many months after The End, any extended (20+ minutes) proximity to people who were actively getting the shots or boosters would dramatically enlarge the tinnitus and dull ache of my ear and head, often inducing enough stress on the nervous system that severe nausea would follow. I went home from dozens of church services profoundly sick, and it was easy enough to test if it were arising from proximity to specific people, and it sadly was. Another contention: “but Paul, even supposing you breathed in a bunch of highly refined, highly concentrated SARS2 spike proteins, how could that cause what happened to you?” I will answer this with a series of wandering remarks, but in short, I believe that what happened to me is nigh unto indescribably improbable (but clearly not impossible). The spike protein is responsible for the vast bulk of SARS2’s pathogenicity. It elicits hyper-inflammatory reactions which cause cell death (via mitochondrial damage et al.) and organ failure; it tends to accumulate in the heart, liver, and kidneys, and it can bypass the blood-brain barrier; and—most importantly for our thought experiment purposes here—IVM has been shown to severely attenuate the pathogenicity of the spike protein. Remember, if you might be so kind, just what it was that put an alacritous end to my tailspin towards oblivion.

If it is not already clear, the elephant in the room of which I am currently speaking might be titled, “But Paul, how did this happen to you—what even happened?” It is logically absurd, if not outright obscurantist, to not hold that the SARS2 spike protein is the root, the radix, of The End. And the simple, indisputable fact is that there are only two sources for the spike protein: WT SARS2 and the mRNA injections. Both serve to hijack the intracellular machinery of one’s body and redirect cells into the manufacture of spike proteins. Both have well-established symptom clusters and side effect profiles, respectively. And given the highly inconvenient fact that I have had, in discrete episodes, the symptoms of each, and yet demonstrably ought only to have had the symptoms of one, hypothesizing necessarily follows. If you find my hypothesizing offensive, after having read everything until now—counting, evidently, The End to have been a trifling thing—then I invite you to divine a means of going through what I went through and perhaps thereby realize how (dis)content you are to settle for the nonsensical, obsequious haruspicy which passes for so much “medical diagnosis” nowadays. Let he who has drunk of this cup cast the first stone.

And I will go one step further, having nothing to lose—having a soul bathed in the fires of living sacrifice, a mind shattered upon the anvil of ego death, and a body branded by searing bands of death—I do not necessarily believe that it is shed spike proteins which I breathed in, which passed through my nose, which wildly, wildly improbably evaded every element of the innate immune system, which melted into capillary beds in my sinuses, which set off mast cells, which triggered an explosion of autoimmune meltdown for months. No, I do not necessarily believe that spike proteins could do all of that—not for as many days as The End was. And I am not so sure that the spike protein could persist in the ductwork for that long, either. But what if there were an engineered substance, a molecular vehicle for a means to produce many, many spike proteins? What if such a vehicle had been designed to be shelf-stable, to be robust, to resist molecular breakdown? Could it persist in ductwork for months? Maybe. Who knows? I doubt anyone does. Ignorance is pleasanter than perjury.

The contents of the SARS2 injection have, in anecdotal cases (but do remember that all of “science” is nothing more than the collation and publication of anecdotes), been shown to be transmittable. I have focused on my house’s ductwork because it is a ready, small-scale example; but please do not presume that I lack the imaginative power to enumerate dozens of other putative vectors for my having been, shall we say, poisoned. The trouble with being too descriptive, of course, is that necessarily, specific people may begin to feel responsible.

Of course, all of this is mere hypothesizing. It is simply my lining up enormous ranges of disparate facts and chronologies and logistical constraints, finding the most logical explanation to simultaneously satisfy as many of those constraints as possible, and then seeking—desperately seeking—to be proven wrong. And thus far, every new piece of literature which I come across only bolsters my reasoning, polymorphic though it be. In early December AD 2022, when one of my eyes spontaneously began to bleed, and continued to bleed for about a week despite no signs of infection or injury, is it a coincidence that it was my right eye? A couple days into the bleeding, while looking up something utterly unrelated, I stumbled upon a preprint study whose title went something like this: “Retinal Hemorrhage following SARS-nCov-2 Vaccination.” I laughed and laughed, and continued tending to my eye as I had been, and it healed a few days later. The blind squirrel may occasionally find a nut, but what about the blind squirrel who can’t stop having them fall on his head? About ten months ago, while glancing at the august Star Tribune for news of Minneapolis’ reconstruction efforts following the destruction wrought in 2020’s violence, I instead stumbled upon an interview with a Mayo Clinic Senior Administrator of Vaccine Such-and-Such, and he was candidly describing the causative relationship between his receipt of multiple SARS2 shots and his crippling tinnitus. He, the consummate materialist, concluded by assuring the public that the shot was inarguably safe, effective, etc.; and yet he also said in so many words that the tinnitus was worth it, and he seemingly embraced the tinnitus as ineluctable and terminal. I am unsure that I know just what he meant by that antecedent-less little pronoun, “it.” I am unsure that he knows, either. But I resolved to not take his road of resignation. To accept, to acquiesce, to some obtuse sentencing of sensory wreckage? No. Man was made for more than this. I continued as I had been. After all, about two months prior, I had found a disturbing case in the UK: a patient had suffered all but one or two of my symptoms of The End, and he had a couple others besides. Despite over a hundred doctor’s appointments and hospitalizations, and a dozen or so surgeries and procedures, over the course of about a year, his condition was only worsening. I wonder whether he is still alive. He and I chose very different paths, after all. And I continued, as I had been doing for many months already, my meandering, straggling quest towards the restoration of my body. For with my eyes shall I see God.

But this is all more than enough science for me. After all, ostensibly that is what science is: hypothesizing. And I tire of it. At the end of the day, long day though it be (according to Robert Penn Warren), the source of my diminishment does not much matter to me. I am content to call it the plague of SARS2, whatever derivation or form thereof it took. To any who may simmer with belligerence, excited to contest any I have written, I only mildly remark that I have not nearly rendered my full evidence and reasoning for musing as I do. Do not suppose that I have exhausted my microbiological knowledge in a handful of sideshow paragraphs of a kaleidoscopic spiritual biography. Some have asked me what I think happened to me because they wish to take measures to protect themselves or their children from my fate. That is the only reason I write any of it. To honor the love of those who seek after Life and hope to have it Abundantly.

The third baptism. But I have come that they may have Life and have it Abundantly. The Greeks had their εὐδαιμονία; the Romans, stoicism; the Christians, Abundant Life. So often, however, I have suspected that we know not that for which we ask. What is it to have Life Abundantly? Elsewhere, we are told that those who lose their lives will gain them; cf. Sophocles’ comment (in the epigraph) regarding death being a “rich reward.” For the Christian, is not death a rich reward, on account of death being merely The End of the Beginning? But: who among us asks to die? The final musical baptism of this Observed Death is unlike the others. It is florid, it is pastel, it is romantic, it is impassioned, it is wild. It is the only I’ve not sung, much less memorized. And it is the only which I shall subject to a little deconstructionism (with apologies in advance to the school of New Criticism).

The tone, the timbre, the aural, sonic quality of this work, rings out in perfect unison with that of my diminished frame. The sensation of my mundane existence, my day to day life, is that of a candle washed out—occluded—by the noonday sun, of a snowflake devoured by the crashing breakers which confer the salt necessary for one to become the salt of the Earth. On many days—not most, but many days—to even breathe is pained, with either my nasal airways inflamed or my lungs aching from lingering ghosts of autoimmunity. This is, I suppose, one reason I adore choral music so much. If to even breathe is to be condemned with pain, mayn’t at least beauty arise from the ache? If hearing is condemned to be forever plagued by ringing, why not sing, covering over the gaping void of abyssal tintinnabulation with shimmering beauty?

It is my impression that many Christians seek after the subject of this poem: to be lost in love with God, to be lost in the love of God [to be briefly deconstructionist, let us make the poem about the Christian God]. And I do not in the least condemn them for seeking it. Drowning, however is not an easy thing: O plunge me deep in love. Because then the poet goes on: put out my senses, leave me deaf and leave me blind. And I am unashamed to admit, for I’ve precious little pride left in these days of ego death, that I never asked to be swept by the tempest of [His] Love. I certainly never cried out, put out my senses. And yet that is what the Author deemed vital for His Grand Pageant, His Great Comedy: my diminishment, even unto being a fool.

And such is my lot, and I cannot forget that we are to be fools for Christ, and my faintly flickering knowledge of the Major Arcana, of the Greater Trumps, reminds me that the Fool is ranked, if at all, as 0. And thus the span is numbered, from 0 to 21, from the Fool all the way to The World. And we are to love the world, and perhaps that can only best be done by diminishment, by becoming but a taper in the rushing wind. By becoming the Fool.

But unlike the poem, I will go further. The choir drifts off in quiet abdication at the end: but not lost in you. But I have already abdicated all. I have abdicated and watched it returned. I have the boldness to say, but now lost in you. And not, as the poem’s title mourns: I Am Not Yours, but rather, I am now Yours. For a single consonant can make all the difference in the world.

When I began formulating this work in my head, many months ago, I had settled from the very beginning on this title: I am now Yours. Of course, that was before I elected the tripartite structure. And over the course of dozens of insomniac nights, I lay awake and chiseled away at the heap of marble wreckage which had been strewn about my heart and mind by the floodwaters of encroaching death. I picked and prodded at thoughts, moving them here or there, staring up at the ceiling, or staring off to the side, where the visitors once lurked; and all the while, I could only hope that that which waited, trapped within the marble, might be a Good and Beautiful Thing. For what else ought we to make than that? And it was over a year ago that a friend offhandedly remarked, “Paul, you should write down what happened to you when you were sick.” He was under the impression that I had recovered, that I was better. And I may never be again—not really. Only One knows. But to press the issue would be to interrogate the Architect, and I’ve no interest in that endeavor. I simply tend to the temple which I have been given, seeking its welfare as best I know. As that temple, my body, falters and often fails, and the blood and the water of mortality can so tempestuously assert themselves, I am, in my most blessèd moments, merely serene. When one once believed that hearing, his most precious sense, was inexorably, inalterably lost, and then hearing (in part) et al. returns, one becomes much more content, or satisfied, in the face of buffeting trauma. Satisfied. From “satisfaction,” from Latin; the whole splendid etymology, I’ll not bore you with: “having been made enough.” I am satisfied.

A friend remarked to me recently: “I just got over being sick for a few days, and being so tired and worn out from that—it made me think of you, and how—what—you’ve, what it’s been like—” And it is true. I am so weary. I am so tired. It has been over a year of waking unrested, of sleeping restlessly, of smeared thoughts, dashed hopes, and dwindling resources. Of so much pain. Of profound depletion. But it has been a year of miracles, of helping to heal others, of seeing life spring into the marred eyes of the hopeless, of beauteous, beauteous fighting: simply by virtue of not giving up. In The Fall, Camus makes mention of how life can become such a violent, twisted, difficult thing that to continue for even five more minutes is a superhuman act. And Camus, as in many other cases, is not wrong here. Is the poet wrong? He writes,

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

In matters of Earthly import, mundane business, vulgar affairs, I consider Tennyson far from incorrect. But in matters of Divine import? In the matter of A Death Observed? No, dear Alfred; I am sorry, but you are so very wrong. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield? What an impossibility. No man has sufficient strength. No man could endure. Soon enough, and sooner than any would wish to admit, to continue would be Camus’ superhuman act.

But what if I were wrong? What if the poet were right—accidentally right, yes, but right nonetheless?

For there is one Man with sufficient strength. One Man capable of enduring.

And so I shall strive, and I shall seek, and I shall find. But to not yield is an impossibility.

So to my God I yield me.

Twice the matter has been raised, and twice I have brushed it aside. Yet, just once more, let us entertain: what is the Architect building amidst the wreckage of The End? I could not presume, but perhaps another, braver, holier soul may. Perhaps one from that Great Cloud which ’round us alway sings, if we but had the ears to hear. Perhaps it is folded into the euphonies of that roar of which George Eliot so delicately wrote. And perhaps I do dare presume, Fool that I am. But; do you remember the Greatest of the Greater Trumps? Behold it here: behold The World, behold The End of The World. Here is the end of death. Here death ends.

Then Sin combined with Death in a firm band
To raze the building to the very floor:
Which they effected, none could them withstand.
But Love and Grace took Glory by the hand,
And built a braver Palace than before.
- George Herbert, “The World” (AD 1633)