Tantas veces me mataron,
tantas veces me morí,
sin embargo estoy aquí
resucitando.
Gracias doy a la desgracia
y a la mano con puñal,
porque me mató tan mal,
y seguí cantando.
Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que el sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.
Tantas veces me borraron,
tantas desaparecí,
a mi propio entierro fui,
sola y llorando.
Hice un nudo del pañuelo,
pero me olvidé después
que no era la única vez
y seguí cantando.
Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que el sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.
Tantas veces te mataron,
tantas resucitarás
cuántas noches pasarás
desesperando.
Y a la hora del naufragio
y a la de la oscuridad
alguien te rescatará,
para ir cantando.
Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que el sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.
I wake up to this song this morning, which was on my mind, and lips, much yesterday. Somehow in the last week , unsolicited, it has insinuated itself into my daily walk. It is essentially a song about active grace--that resurrecting power, which is open to us at every moment of our lives, to redeem and create purpose from all the minor or not so minor deaths that inevitably befall us each day (too often, inflicted by our own hand--la mano con puñal). This is the essence, the most important thing, in so much of what I've been thinking through lately. No surprise, and no novelty: if Hans Kung is right, it is the essence of the Christian message.
What the song leaves unexplained is how one finds the voice to sing through death--save in the last verse, where it is tellingly at the rescuing hands of another. The voice is found, I believe, in the moment one chooses to open oneself to grace: to let go of whatever it is you are clinging to that keeps you in the place of death. This action can and must be quite concrete, literally embodied; leaving it vague and metaphorical serves only as an excuse to sentimentally hold a pious idea that translates into nothing, which may be the beginning of all bad (and mythological) theology. What one must let go of may be the tightness of your body or the shallowness of your breath, the habitual words of self-denunciation resounding with vindication in your mind, the rage or despair trying to make a nest in your heart that some part of you so much wants to abandon itself to. (Open will, open mind, open heart). The letting go is, however, only one side of the action; accompanying it, enabling it, is the act of faith, the trust that in fact, at the bottom of your "fall," beneath all the hooks trying to catch you which you refuse to catch, grace is waiting.
The "fall" or "drop"--still the most convenient language I've found to describe the "depth" implied (going deeper into self)--is at once the fall into your self, into the world, and into God. Yet even it remains inadequate, because really the action has two directions of opening: it is at once both a sinking deeper within oneself, and an opening more fully and broadly to the world, as the song calls "cantando al sol" (here, it has been my teacher). In my experience, there can even be a sense of broadening and sudden slip into clarity of one's visual field when one makes the choice to open. It is as if one becomes at once more transparent, to the full complexity and plurality of one's states, and to the incredible kaleidoscope of the world that has up to the moment drifted through the doors of the senses relatively unnoticed, and certainly unappreciated. Again, the language of grace must be tethered to real experience, which means: tethered to the body and the heart.
The faith I spoke of that grace waits at the bottom, I feel must be said, is not a blind faith, not the romanticized leap into the absolute dark. It is the faith that has encountered grace before, that can trust to find it there both because it is promised (by Christ, by one's community, by the inchoate prophetic intuition buried within each of our beings) and because it has somehow experienced the truth of that promise in the past. Yet it is also always blind to some extent, and so always requires a certain upsurge of courage, for it may be the case that grace proves evasive, or inadequate (in our opinion), or incapable of holding us in its embrace before we reach back to our hooks. Of course, all of that may be appearance, may be because we have not fully opened ourselves after all--but how hard, how impossible to know! On the other hand, perhaps it is all too adequate, but requires letting go of something--a cherished idol of one's self-image, or a seemingly essential desire--that is so hard to be wrenched away from the experience is crucifying as well as redeeming. The Christian proclamation, writ in the wounds of Jesus's resurrected body, is, alas, all too unambiguous here.
I will pick up that thread before too long. But now, to return to the song. For me, "Como La Cigarra" is not pure metaphor, but in one respect quite literal. Somehow, it has been given to me that grace solicits my choice to open and find redemption through an invitation to sing. As I have discovered, at moments, over the last two months, singing is a distinctive way for me of opening myself, and simultaneously finding and expressing what it is I encounter when I do. It is my embodied act of affirming the breadth of the world. This song in particular, which even yesterday had the remarkable power to redeem bitterness, boredom, and resignation, and make of them gratitude. Yo, como la cigarra, lo tengo como parte de mi naturaleza, cantando al sol.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
A first reflection on Teilhard de Chardin
This morning, about forty minutes ago, I finished The Phenomenon of Man. To say it left an impression is an understatement. My encounter with Teilhard, yesterday, when I read the bulk of the book (all but about 50 pages of it), had the urgency and forcefulness of a revelation. All the while, it was as if my mind were being forced open, as if key missing pieces of this puzzle I've been assembling were being given me, and as if my own vision, which I saw anticipated (in far greater detail) in Teilhard's pages, were being confirmed and bestowed its inheritance.
That encounter had the uncanny aura of something long in the preparation and making. I've encountered Teilhard twice before. First, some years ago, those earliest enthusiasms reading his prayers in high school. I remember the excited conversation with Mr. Holm, his unwavering smile, his unwavering dismissive laughter--"Noosphere! How ridiculous is that" I don't know what of the whole vision I saw then, nor how clearly; I also don't know how it would have confirmed its truth to me then, save as an exciting curiosity which blew open the confining walls of my high school Catholicism. Evidently, it wasn't enough to make a terribly lasting impression, at least not one capable of surviving my move out of faith in college. When I began to return, Teilhard was not on my mind. If anything, I remember reading mentions of him in Rahner with dismissal (Mr. Holm internalized?), assured that in Rahner I had finally found "serious theology," quite distinct from the exuberant, almost New Age enthusiasms of a man who was by then "so high school." Meticulous rational justification, existential depth (both in unexpected abundance in Rahner), the twin makings (I thought) of theological seriousness--far from it! And in any case, Teilhard was surely too far removed from orthodoxy to be regarded as "Real Christianity" (! Yes! I thought this! Then again, so did Roberto Unger).
The second encounter, however, came evidently in early March of this last year, when for a reason I don't quite remember I'd picked up the prayer book (Spiritual Masters series) one morning and found myself, to my surprise, overwhelmingly moved by Teilhard's prayer of eucharistic offering for the world. The passion of his words crackled with an all-consuming fire, sparks of which I found rising up to answer within myself. There was a deep bond, suddenly discovered, all at once. When I began to read, a week later, The Phenomenon of Man, it was no longer from the dull sense of obligation ("I should probably read this, because he's an important modern thinker) with which I'd picked up a tattered copy for $6.00 two falls before; it was with excitement. My excitement did not go unrewarded: I remember the animation which grew and carried me forward as I began to move, then pore, through the pages, the awakenings of new awareness as I started to "see" Teilhard's vision and become convinced that it must be true. I remember the afternoon at Cafe Algiers, with Marisa, at the table overlooking the first floor, where I patted the book and said "Yo, Teilhard's got it!" and began to explain the possible connections I saw to our infant attempt at eco-theology.
Yet for some reason, I didn't finish; I stopped about halfway through. I remember thinking several times afterwards that I should pick it up again, yet resisting doing so, or putting it in my bag as my "book for the day" only if accompanied by another book (which I always read instead). Perhaps I got bogged down in the technical (and probably outdated) paleo-biology of the "Tree of Life" section, and feared the rest of the book would be like that. That inertia may have led me to add the further rationalization that I'd caught my glimpse the vision already, absorbed it, and now knew what was coming--and besides, there were so many other things to read! (I can't remember now what they were). In any case, I did not open it again until two days ago. I now realize that, still, something must have not sunken into me all the way through on even that reading. Or else, something did, and I was not yet ready to receive it.
How much has changed since then, it seems! In the span of two months, I've moved from having a growing sense of direction to actually having, in rough form, the beginnings of the vision I want to put together, and realize in my writing. I can now bring to my reading not merely a curiosity--however hungry and consuming (even insatiable)--but a purpose, the directed need to find in it the materials with which to realize the work that is gathering itself into articulate form somewhere deep in my mind. Before I read, and thought, and conversed, with a vague feeling of orientation, increasingly confident in a general intellectual "vocation" ("to be a programmatic thinker for the community of the Church"--Dec. 2009; --"to work out a new vision of reason" (somewhere all the way back to 2008; --"to create a paradigm of 'transformational theology'"--March 2011; "to create a work of integration"). What's new is that now the material itself has started to assemble into a structure, as, through the mere application of focus, presence, and patience--and, I might add, the permission of abandonment--I watch. I can now see what I read fitting into it, and direct my mind and my pursuit accordingly.
What's clear already is that Teilhard has given me a very sizable piece of the puzzle. I had to pause several times while reading yesterday and allow myself to think, with wonder "This man teaches one not just what to think, but how, and shows that the two are, in a subtle but inescapable way, quite tightly interconnected. Only a certain way of thinking--the "organicist" way I am trying, with great but reducing inarticulacy, to describe--allows the whole of the reality we experience, and are situated, enmeshed, within, to be grasped, and "seen." The method finds its validation in the content, in precisely the ability to contain all, and order it. What's more, the vision, once glimpsed, is not only intellectually opening and clarifying (two essential, but different qualities), but calls forth an answer deeper within ourselves, from our hearts and wills. It is impossible, having grasped the fullness and soundness of Teilhard's vision, not to find oneself deeply moved. And not just diffusely moved ("I know not how"--as in many works of art), but specifically moved to hope, to love, and to profound affirmation--of oneself and the universe to which one belongs, with a startling new self-awareness and clarity. The mind finds it can believe the vision is true, the heart finds it desperately wants to believe the vision is true, the will finds it can, and is moved, to choose to believe the vision is true, and to love it. In other words, an assent not just with the mind, with the whole of our being--a "spiritual" assent.
The humbling, exalting, terrifying thought: if Teilhard's vision is taken as it is offered, this act of assent is not merely mine. It is the assent of the universe to its own existence, its own awareness, and its own purpose. In those thoroughly mundane afternoon minutes, as I sat and wondered over a book at small windowside table in the Danish Pastry House, sipping a cooling coffee and trying not to get distracted by the buzzing conversation of lunch hour, the universe was saying "Yes" to itself! To the whole of its existence across all of space-time, and to that immense whole reflected in this single, tiny, flawed, swiftly and pitifully dying vessel that I am. What a wonder is that! Is there any way not to feel the pull to find the appropriate summit and proclaim it to the world with all of one's being?
Is that not the experience of the Gospel in the 21st Century? Does it deserve any less?
"I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well." -Psalm 139: 14
That encounter had the uncanny aura of something long in the preparation and making. I've encountered Teilhard twice before. First, some years ago, those earliest enthusiasms reading his prayers in high school. I remember the excited conversation with Mr. Holm, his unwavering smile, his unwavering dismissive laughter--"Noosphere! How ridiculous is that" I don't know what of the whole vision I saw then, nor how clearly; I also don't know how it would have confirmed its truth to me then, save as an exciting curiosity which blew open the confining walls of my high school Catholicism. Evidently, it wasn't enough to make a terribly lasting impression, at least not one capable of surviving my move out of faith in college. When I began to return, Teilhard was not on my mind. If anything, I remember reading mentions of him in Rahner with dismissal (Mr. Holm internalized?), assured that in Rahner I had finally found "serious theology," quite distinct from the exuberant, almost New Age enthusiasms of a man who was by then "so high school." Meticulous rational justification, existential depth (both in unexpected abundance in Rahner), the twin makings (I thought) of theological seriousness--far from it! And in any case, Teilhard was surely too far removed from orthodoxy to be regarded as "Real Christianity" (! Yes! I thought this! Then again, so did Roberto Unger).
The second encounter, however, came evidently in early March of this last year, when for a reason I don't quite remember I'd picked up the prayer book (Spiritual Masters series) one morning and found myself, to my surprise, overwhelmingly moved by Teilhard's prayer of eucharistic offering for the world. The passion of his words crackled with an all-consuming fire, sparks of which I found rising up to answer within myself. There was a deep bond, suddenly discovered, all at once. When I began to read, a week later, The Phenomenon of Man, it was no longer from the dull sense of obligation ("I should probably read this, because he's an important modern thinker) with which I'd picked up a tattered copy for $6.00 two falls before; it was with excitement. My excitement did not go unrewarded: I remember the animation which grew and carried me forward as I began to move, then pore, through the pages, the awakenings of new awareness as I started to "see" Teilhard's vision and become convinced that it must be true. I remember the afternoon at Cafe Algiers, with Marisa, at the table overlooking the first floor, where I patted the book and said "Yo, Teilhard's got it!" and began to explain the possible connections I saw to our infant attempt at eco-theology.
Yet for some reason, I didn't finish; I stopped about halfway through. I remember thinking several times afterwards that I should pick it up again, yet resisting doing so, or putting it in my bag as my "book for the day" only if accompanied by another book (which I always read instead). Perhaps I got bogged down in the technical (and probably outdated) paleo-biology of the "Tree of Life" section, and feared the rest of the book would be like that. That inertia may have led me to add the further rationalization that I'd caught my glimpse the vision already, absorbed it, and now knew what was coming--and besides, there were so many other things to read! (I can't remember now what they were). In any case, I did not open it again until two days ago. I now realize that, still, something must have not sunken into me all the way through on even that reading. Or else, something did, and I was not yet ready to receive it.
How much has changed since then, it seems! In the span of two months, I've moved from having a growing sense of direction to actually having, in rough form, the beginnings of the vision I want to put together, and realize in my writing. I can now bring to my reading not merely a curiosity--however hungry and consuming (even insatiable)--but a purpose, the directed need to find in it the materials with which to realize the work that is gathering itself into articulate form somewhere deep in my mind. Before I read, and thought, and conversed, with a vague feeling of orientation, increasingly confident in a general intellectual "vocation" ("to be a programmatic thinker for the community of the Church"--Dec. 2009; --"to work out a new vision of reason" (somewhere all the way back to 2008; --"to create a paradigm of 'transformational theology'"--March 2011; "to create a work of integration"). What's new is that now the material itself has started to assemble into a structure, as, through the mere application of focus, presence, and patience--and, I might add, the permission of abandonment--I watch. I can now see what I read fitting into it, and direct my mind and my pursuit accordingly.
What's clear already is that Teilhard has given me a very sizable piece of the puzzle. I had to pause several times while reading yesterday and allow myself to think, with wonder "This man teaches one not just what to think, but how, and shows that the two are, in a subtle but inescapable way, quite tightly interconnected. Only a certain way of thinking--the "organicist" way I am trying, with great but reducing inarticulacy, to describe--allows the whole of the reality we experience, and are situated, enmeshed, within, to be grasped, and "seen." The method finds its validation in the content, in precisely the ability to contain all, and order it. What's more, the vision, once glimpsed, is not only intellectually opening and clarifying (two essential, but different qualities), but calls forth an answer deeper within ourselves, from our hearts and wills. It is impossible, having grasped the fullness and soundness of Teilhard's vision, not to find oneself deeply moved. And not just diffusely moved ("I know not how"--as in many works of art), but specifically moved to hope, to love, and to profound affirmation--of oneself and the universe to which one belongs, with a startling new self-awareness and clarity. The mind finds it can believe the vision is true, the heart finds it desperately wants to believe the vision is true, the will finds it can, and is moved, to choose to believe the vision is true, and to love it. In other words, an assent not just with the mind, with the whole of our being--a "spiritual" assent.
The humbling, exalting, terrifying thought: if Teilhard's vision is taken as it is offered, this act of assent is not merely mine. It is the assent of the universe to its own existence, its own awareness, and its own purpose. In those thoroughly mundane afternoon minutes, as I sat and wondered over a book at small windowside table in the Danish Pastry House, sipping a cooling coffee and trying not to get distracted by the buzzing conversation of lunch hour, the universe was saying "Yes" to itself! To the whole of its existence across all of space-time, and to that immense whole reflected in this single, tiny, flawed, swiftly and pitifully dying vessel that I am. What a wonder is that! Is there any way not to feel the pull to find the appropriate summit and proclaim it to the world with all of one's being?
Is that not the experience of the Gospel in the 21st Century? Does it deserve any less?
"I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well." -Psalm 139: 14
Prayer for 6/3/2011
Holy One,
I am grateful this morning. Grateful, that you have given me another morning to carry on the task--mine, yours, ours. Grateful, that you have made it so radiant; the sun curls round the cream of our shades to fall in brilliant pools around the room. Grateful, for the human mind, and heart, and the outbursts of their inspiration: for the music of Mozart, which laughs and chatters with the wisdom concealed behind humor as I write this morning.
Grateful, for the return: for the strange coincidence that I should have left this blog in existence (having deleted the other one, an exercise in self-promotion, long ago), that I should find it this morning, quite ready for it, that its title and even url should be perfect to the moment at which I am. That I should see myself shining through so clearly in its sparse entries. How the entry on the election still speaks after all of these months and their disappointments! How the silly entry on Argentina reflects back the amusement--laughing, knowing, yet uncruel (I hope)--I hope to always keep with me, for the purposes of my sanity, and savor.
Grateful, above all, for my encounter, yesterday and this morning, with Teilhard de Chardin. At moments, he appeared almost as a gatekeeper, not merely opening but forcing open the doors of revelation and holding them fast and wide with a shout of joy, as that revelation streamed in and seized me, my mouth opening in sympathy with my astonished eyes, my heart tight with the movement of meaning, my breathing only regular through conscious remembering-- to keep my heart from bursting. What breadth of vision! What depth and confidence of hope! And for all that, at all but the end, somehow, a humility, so different in key from the usual apostate apostles of Progress. I found another soul friend yesterday, another source of inspiration, another interlocutor.
It was impossible not to feel, walking home from Danish Pastry House (where I did the bulk of my reading), something move with in me. I could feel within myself the same spirit, the same vision of Teilhard, restively wanting to be born. The liberation of shame and doubt seeing themselves for what they were and melting away in the face of the light, a choice, and yet a choice forced upon me. Happily forced upon me.
Thank you, Holy One, for the ever-expanding witness and meaning of Jesus, whose face I have begun to see, in suggestion, everywhere. May he be with me today--as I write, as I read, as I talk with Jim, in the doctor's office, yes, even in the gay bar. Let me make the choice to be true to that spirit I met and found again yesterday, with your help.
Amen.
I am grateful this morning. Grateful, that you have given me another morning to carry on the task--mine, yours, ours. Grateful, that you have made it so radiant; the sun curls round the cream of our shades to fall in brilliant pools around the room. Grateful, for the human mind, and heart, and the outbursts of their inspiration: for the music of Mozart, which laughs and chatters with the wisdom concealed behind humor as I write this morning.
Grateful, for the return: for the strange coincidence that I should have left this blog in existence (having deleted the other one, an exercise in self-promotion, long ago), that I should find it this morning, quite ready for it, that its title and even url should be perfect to the moment at which I am. That I should see myself shining through so clearly in its sparse entries. How the entry on the election still speaks after all of these months and their disappointments! How the silly entry on Argentina reflects back the amusement--laughing, knowing, yet uncruel (I hope)--I hope to always keep with me, for the purposes of my sanity, and savor.
Grateful, above all, for my encounter, yesterday and this morning, with Teilhard de Chardin. At moments, he appeared almost as a gatekeeper, not merely opening but forcing open the doors of revelation and holding them fast and wide with a shout of joy, as that revelation streamed in and seized me, my mouth opening in sympathy with my astonished eyes, my heart tight with the movement of meaning, my breathing only regular through conscious remembering-- to keep my heart from bursting. What breadth of vision! What depth and confidence of hope! And for all that, at all but the end, somehow, a humility, so different in key from the usual apostate apostles of Progress. I found another soul friend yesterday, another source of inspiration, another interlocutor.
It was impossible not to feel, walking home from Danish Pastry House (where I did the bulk of my reading), something move with in me. I could feel within myself the same spirit, the same vision of Teilhard, restively wanting to be born. The liberation of shame and doubt seeing themselves for what they were and melting away in the face of the light, a choice, and yet a choice forced upon me. Happily forced upon me.
Thank you, Holy One, for the ever-expanding witness and meaning of Jesus, whose face I have begun to see, in suggestion, everywhere. May he be with me today--as I write, as I read, as I talk with Jim, in the doctor's office, yes, even in the gay bar. Let me make the choice to be true to that spirit I met and found again yesterday, with your help.
Amen.
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