"'Et tu, Brute,' rief Er auf Lateinisch

--wie est dort die Landesprache war."

I've apologized once, and I've apologized twice, and I've apologized more than that, too, for when my rhetoric verges over into the preachy ~

~ See, the thing is, much as I might love Dominicans, I grew up when and where I grew up, none of which admittedly were the best of all possible places or times and any of which maybe should have been the thirteenth or fourteenth or seventeenth century but were not and, accordingly, while I have absolutely no bad feelings whatsoever about 'prædicare' since I can't speak any Latin other than 'Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,'* I cannot help but wince, shake a little, and discreetly and in an eminently ladylike fashion vomit inside my mouth from smelling the imagined leeching vapors of petroleum by-products from obstreperous and designed-to-impress synthetic altar-flower arrangements basted with 'Inspired-by-Nature' 'fresheners' at 7 AM sharp every Sunday anytime I find myself within 26 miles of 'preachy'~

So it is that every time I go off on caritas, agape, empathy, compassion, love, the Beatitudes, the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nagarjuna, Dostoevsky, Avalokitesvara, or even Common Decent Neighborliness, I always feel as though I have too much product and too many extensions in my hair, too overwhelming a desire to restate endlessly the obvious with an ever-increasing lack of delicacy, decency, and eloquence, too great a tendency to tripthongize my dipthongs, and a garish and enormous Daughters of the Confederacy pin tacked to my (it would be, under the circumstances) abundant bosom.

So, as a sop to myself and those of you who find my exhortations as tiring as I do, here is a panel from my favorite comic strip writer, Peter Blegvad, whose Leviathan ran in the Independent and to which I was as addicted when I lived in Greece and Suffolk as I was to Gauloises Bleues and those pull-out, frame-able sections about minerals, indigenous beetles, and traffic patterns in the Sunday El País.


*'It's not the heat; it's the humidity.'

'Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus' --T.S. Eliot

So, on the day after the prudential judgment talk, while Fr. Fones was still at Blessed Sacrament (where you can attend a real live Dominican Rite Mass on 8.8.8), when I cornered him (which is what I do - when I can muster the courage, which is most of the time these days - with anyone religious or otherwise who is living out his or her vocation), he brought up Mother Teresa's view of those she served: that what she saw was the suffering and wounded Christ in each and every one of them.

She said it numerous times to different people, as that was precisely what compelled her to do what she did. But the version it brought to my mind was when a journalist asked her if she didn't have an ethical problem, or wasn't in some way in conflict with her faith, serving those who were dying of AIDS. Mother Teresa said something about not even understanding what he meant, and repeated that all she saw was the suffering Christ.

And a couple different aspects of that interaction really strike me as relevant to issues we face when addressing the problems of poverty and homelessness. One thing that is just terribly sad is that the reporter (I don't recall at all if it was a secular or religious reporter, big-time, small-town, male, female, or anything else) appears to be trying to create two classes, to separate himself and Teresa in their righteousness on the one hand from the dying sinner on the other. (Again, no idea whether he was really feeling that, or just playing devil's advocate to get a good quote, or perhaps even a gay man himself really hoping she was indeed as loving as he wanted to believe.)

The other issue it brought to my mind was how we look at 'those sorts of people' in general. I think very, very few, even among believers in Christ, manage to see glimpses of Him in the wretched of the earth. Fine: very few of us are saints, so that stands to reason. But we tend not even to see ourselves in them! That should be a much easier leap - and yet we so frequently see their suffering as proof not of our unity, shared longings, and common fears, but as clear signs of the gulf between us. To their fallenness we contrast our responsible jobs; to their lack of restraint we contrast our calm demeanor and good relations with coworkers; against their battles with addiction and petty crime we recall our sober investment practices and our determined, successful New Year's Weight-Loss Resolutions.

But I will repeat that any one of us is a finite number of tragedies away from our own version of just that level of despair. Some of us are broken more easily, some require decades of horror and abuse in order finally to abandon hope. And we can never know what it would take until we, too, are there ourselves. Just as the invisibles on the street didn't know. Just as they never hoped for the day when their suffering would be so inconsequential that most people wouldn't even see it as suffering, but justice, judgment - or simply an inconvenience.

I am not a pessimistic person, but I see a few bad winters ahead. With gas, electricity, and heating prices rising, the elderly in many places are not going to be able to heat their homes. With the mortgage crisis continuing, more families will be displaced. With food prices rising along with all other bills, contributions to already overtaxed food banks are diminishing - and thus, so, too, will access. My 'positive' spin on my fears is that, with more 'normal' people finding themselves on the margins, it may become easier for the other normal people to begin to see poverty not as a moral failing or a vice but a complex state of affairs brought on by many factors. Perhaps the struggling banks and airlines and weak dollar could be held up to the sceptical as examples that bad things can indeed happen to good people (well, corporate 'persons,' at any rate). Perhaps a negative $200,000 downturn in the value of one citizen's home could serve as testimony that if external conditions could affect one life so dramatically, they or a different set of circumstances might well be able to operate in a similarly striking fashion elsewhere.

In other words, I am hoping that all the nastiness that is still to come will help people to realize it could happen here, and it could happen now, and it could happen to me. Maybe for one person it will take a job loss, for someone else that and the loss of home, too, and for the very strong maybe no job, no house, a DUI conviction and a departing spouse. But if Mother Teresa could pray for years with loneliness and despair in her heart, I think many, many people in the coming years will receive the gift of brokenness. I hope it helps them see the humanity, and the divine, in the rest of the wounded.

Avalokitesvara Meets Aristotle, or Metta in the Modern World

The other night we were talking about the Fifth Commandment. As with everything else, Catholics have a rich understanding of the larger meaning of this rule. One direction it got me thinking, since it has always been the focus of my own spiritual path, is about compassion, or gentleness, or love, as one's abiding principle. Though this is not a specifically Catholic position, there is room for it within orthodoxy. I can believe the Church's position on just war, for example, but in searching my own conscience find no examples in history or current events in which this doctrine has been put into action.

But sticking (at least for the moment) to absolute orthodoxy, within the Catechism itself the Commandment's proscription against murder is understood to extend to anger. Anger construed in its active sense as wishing another ill is, I think, fairly obviously the opposite of charity/caritas, which is itself the active version of love or, viewed differently, the inevitable fruit of compassion. In this view, there is some transactional quality behind even the impulse to charity, inasmuch as it would seem to me that, lacking the ability to feel the other's position, being therefore unable genuinely to embrace empathy or compassion, there is no soil for mercy or charity to grow in. It is not simply a matter of 'If A then B,' which is, if you believe it, rather a lot by itself, making charity not merely a result but an inextricable concomitant of compassion and love. It is as well the understanding that 'If not A then not B,' -- and 'If not B then clearly not A.'

In this framework, my good works evidence my love, and lack of love, by contrast, confers a quite different meaning on ostensible works of charity. I argued tonight that once someone internalizes this comprehensive compassion there are certain acts that the person will never be able to do, there are certain choices that will never again have to be made. It is a different way of being, a different way of interacting with the world. If one has reached the point of being able to see the Divine, the Buddha-nature - or in Quaker terms, the Inner Light - within others, the point of being able readily to relate to another's suffering, it is not a matter of choosing not to strike. Certain reactions do not arise, and therefore certain responses are precluded a priori. They are precluded unconsciously, actually, since the mind does not have to go yet again to the point of laboring intellectually over a matter which was in fact long ago decided.



And this is all very pressing to me, given my own particular road of spiritual development. On my path, compassion, tolerance, and gentleness have always seemed the most necessary bedrock, the attributes without which other virtues are either meaningless or impossible. Moreover, in order to attain those three, one must start with the very first stone, which is humility. One cannot understand the struggles of another, let alone wish to ease the other's suffering, if he cannot first comprehend - viscerally, completely, in the profoundest depths of his soul - the truth of 'there but for the grace of God go I.'

My view is simple: there is no species of human suffering that is the province only of one type of human. The paths that lead to suffering are as diverse as the people who choose them and who are thrust into them, but in the end, sadness, loneliness, and fear are experienced as the same thing by us all, at whatever age, in whatever country, with whatever level of education or wealth. Whatever someone else is feeling, the specifics of his or her situation notwithstanding, is something each of us has, will, or can feel ourselves.

It is easier to feel compassion and thus be giving when the stakes are low, when the issue is something like rude and aggressive driving, or getting overcharged by a mechanic, than when it involves actual hatred or violence -- but that is where the principle is proven. That is where a person either lives his truth or renounces the core of his beliefs. Responding calmly to mild stress is one thing; very, very, very few of us even consider running over pedestrians on a crosswalk because they are making us late for a business meeting. In situations of real violence or deliberate victimization, literally turning the other cheek is a significantly deeper commitment.

One of the things I take greatest comfort in within Catholic spirituality is the huge emphasis laid on individual discernment, on prudent use of one's own conscience to determine the correct path in novel circumstances. This is likewise one of the things I most respect about the Friends; both share a belief that with prayer and devout listening we have it within ourselves to hear God's will, an amazing God-given power of judgment. In Catholicism, obviously there is more dogma and doctrine than with the Friends, but if after the best use I can make of my conscience I find in that something I cannot fully accept, or one element, such as mercy, the necessity of which outshines all other imperatives, that is between God and me, so long as I don't portray my actions as being representative of all official Church teaching.

And that is a tremendous gift of spiritual liberty, borne of a deep respect for the many ways we in our wondrous diversity can inhabit God's Word. If this catholicity of gifts and spiritualities were not recognized, then in a manner of speaking either the Carthusians or the Franciscans would have to be 'wrong.' Either the noble soldier serving his country or the grandmother in the Peace and Justice Ministry would be a heretic, and somebody or other would have to chuck either the thinky Chesterton, the silent John Main, or the loving Jean Vanier off the proverbial Train to Glory. I'm glad we get to keep them all!

Because Underneath ,You Feel Pure Permanence

I don't think most people know how to be in relationships. I don't believe most people are, in their hearts, really looking for something huge and overpowering, something not merely substantive, which is unusual enough itself, but transformative. Love can do that, can change us immeasurably for the better, but one has to be opened to it, one has to accept the vulnerability that is both a prerequisite and a consequent of real love.

And of course that is terrifying. It is totally unlike our normal interactions, which are based on suites of deliberately congruent, affected manners, dictions, postures, appearances, that correspond to and flesh out whatever role we are enacting in that context. This isn't base or even dishonest: on the one hand, we really do need the second cellist behaving like a cellist during the symphony and not a botanist or ironworker; and on the other, he really is a cellist, as evidenced by the presence of his chair in the pit and his bowing of the strings. That isn't disingenuous; it's getting the job done!

But maybe it is the difference between a Bach fugue and bebop. Precision, order, the beauty of the work found in its elegant mathematics, in its stolid girders, right angles and re-bar, in perfection of Form above all else, as against the piercing, unutterable glory that can come only from leap of faith compounded geometrically by subsequent leap after leap after leap -- all these being, not 'explored' in a self-indulgent descent into solipsism, and certainly not 'reconciled' or 'rescued' once the head reemerges --no, not at all, but bared, freed, radically embraced, and then transcended and born anew, via that selfsame melody that could always so easily enslave a pedant or fundamentalist.

So I think it's a big deal, Love. I have difficulty understanding shopping for it, I admit, and I get prickly thinking of the people who don't bother to reflect on it and its significance, especially when they do already, or could if they expended effort, live inside it. I think it takes work, yes, but so do wine and music and childbirth, and yet people keep doing those without saying Wait, I need some Time to Listen to 'Self' in the middle of a bloody solo or parturition.

When you are in love, when you cherish someone, you honor them. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. According to Thomas Merton, at any rate, and I agree that Love is indeed that elegantly simple, and that boundlessly rewarding. Still, it requires effort, requires temperance; and that miraculous, supple, and overpowering solicitude born jointly of eros and agape can only exist where there is sufficient maturity, wisdom, and openheartedness to allow its first seeds to grow.

I think where that sort of genuine and mature love is present, there are lines not merely inconceivable, but impossible, to cross. It's quite easy to see why kvetching about 'never getting any' to your hot boss or flirty assistant is risky, but while it may not be a Gateway to Sin! in everyone's view to lament someone's weight gain, odd facial hair choice, lack of understanding, bad habits, or emotional issues to friends, it nevertheless creates a rift. It lets someone in where they shouldn't be, between the man and the woman. It also keeps those complaints or critiques closer to the front of your mind, even when it's just you two. Joe from the pool hall is right there, in bed with you, with his I-Hear-You-Man comments from yesterday about his wife's growing middle as you run your hands up your wife's now-size-40 hips.

We are conditioned that, to a certain extent, articulation makes it so. Nearly all of our experience is filtered, necessarily, through language. This is why people do affirmations. 'I am good. I am strong. I do not eat Snickers.' Imagine if instead of desperate, last-ditch efforts at 'I love my husband. I love my husband. I love my husband' we had the wife daily complaining to her girlfriends about his stutter, his pot belly, his skin condition, and his lack of sexual skill. And, as we all know, our friends can be relied upon to take our side in such things. It is rare indeed for one of these sort of confidants to interrogate the speaker, ask him why it is he would want to say such disrespectful things, what it is he is really feeling, whether he understands that speaking out of class like that is going to leak a poison in and keep all those things in his mind.

I cringe when I hear such things spoken by people in a relationship -- and we hear them all the time. If it is one on one, I at least have the liberty and the opportunity to ask the other sorts of questions, the sort that can go somewhere, the sort that can open the person's heart rather than seal it shut for good -- but so often people just spout this crap, and don't care who hears. And then someone else commiserates, and tells private details about his partner. And then I perhaps know more about the state of his relationship than his spouse does!

Meanwhile, I am course am thinking You bloody idiots: you have someone who loves you! I am not speaking here of abusive things, or of gambling addictions, or infidelity. Instead, it's stupid, quotidian annoyances, or habitual ways of doing things regarding which the individuals' tendencies and preferences are at odds. Or, of course, pot bellies, skin conditions, Comfortable Shoes, fatigue at sex-time, and, simply, two people who were once together, engaged now in building up separate lives, deliberately or indeliberately. After a certain point, the fissure is irreparable, and if not 'Man,' then surely man's ego, has rent the two solidly asunder.

I have a stance, as well, partly ethical, partly aesthetic, part pragmatic, and part just Healthy Living, that distills down to wait and see, I suppose. A few bucks lost here and there at the race track is not the same as the mortgage payment going to the bookie. An otherwise shockingly thoughtful anniversary gift ordered too late for timely arrival is not the same as spending that anniversary with another girl in a hotel room. And, again (this is the pragmatic angle, I suppose, mixed in with the ethical), if you spend all the time collecting notes on what is not perfect, that, my dear, is what is in your head. Not the moments of beauty, not the act of deep tenderness, but the why-didn't-he-X-when-I-felt-sure-he-would? And if you take all those to your friends, because they're all clustering around your brain making you sick because you chose to focus on them and now can't think of the other things, after your iteration of all his/her failings, what do you think they will say? What average friend ever counsels, Yes, but she's so.... Or, But those are trivial, and look what he does when.... Or, Work on it, work on it, work on it, and keep your love for that person always in your mind?

But perhaps that is what distinguishes Love and friendship. Friendship so often concerns itself with reinforcing the status quo, with affirming assumptions rather than challenging them, by 'supporting' the friend in the least difficult, most prosaic ways. Love, by contrast, keeps always one hand outstretched to the Divine and the other gently opened to the beauty to be found here. It is the turning of the Mevlevi, the name of God ceaselessly on the lips, each step and every breath a rupture and mediation between the ineffable and the temporal.
Love seeks alternately to veil and to transcend the less savoury aspects of what we see in this pathetic, finite moment, pointing always to the grander vision that lies beyond. It reaches, challenges, wounds, elates, soars. Love never disappoints, although it sometimes kills.

I know you touch so fervently because the caress preserves,/because the place you cover up, O tender ones,/doesn't disappear; because underneath, you feel/ pure permanence. Thus your embraces almost promise you eternity. -Rilke, Duino Elegies, 'Second Elegy'