Consume
To Lack. To Satiate. To Conjure. To Attach. To Rely. To Pervert.
To consume is to satiate, but satiation is not what we need. Consumption flails itself against the wall of necessity while grace inlays its foundation. Grace is to take in an object without making it into one. It is a detachment without destruction. It is the only gesture towards understanding. "The only way of salvation is to replace the unendurable idea of compulsion, not by the illusion of devotion, but by the notion of necessity."
I am Adam just as you are Adam and as free will allows us the privilege of consumption it devours us whole. We are taken by entropic repetition and willingly destroy what was (and is still) our greatest gift. Even the good is stained with blood. The rain only thins it out and spreads it infinitely deep but it cannot make it white again. Our pleasure is a plaster cast that hardens over it and elicits sympathy from our Dionysian caravans. We soon forget the cost of this gift and even more the granter. How foolish our simple minds and how simple the gesture of our ingratitude. What pains me more still is our heart's wayward unrest.
What can sever us from this great gift other than our own decaying flesh? Our choice is either to consume and attach (gravity) or to flee and detach (Grace). We must detach. flee yes, but flee with fervor and devotion. flee with every fiber of He who rests within you. Flee from the treacherous flood that makes stray our wandering spirit. This is by no means an escape. "To escape by a return to the primitive state is a lazy solution. We have to rediscover the original pact between the spirit and the world in this very civilization of which we form a part." (Weil, Algebra) We must insert distance before we can move forth. And although our breath stops short of progress, we must learn to play the lyre. Hold onto hopeful twigs of truth and be guided alone by what is absolute.
As Paul mourns a battle of wills (Romans 7), I too stand upon the front lines of metaphysical warfare and cast shadows into the valley below. It is most difficult to fight for what has already been won but I have hidden deep your white flag. The ground is far from me and I much dislike the taste of earth. I am weak with pride which suspends my apparent whole, absently. I am consumed. As you pervert me I pervert me. Unjust appears as just, so as I am undone I undo you also.
"Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:24)
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
D is for Distance.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
B is for Beauty
Beautiful
What is perhaps merely being itself. What is your eyes with tears knowing you are loved. What is you never looking more so than turning a smile. What is a poem I do not understand. What is strange. What is familiar. What is the late sunlight through bodies of water. What is the crevice of your neck. What is the sound of voices in harmony. What is the strength of tigers. What is the crush of waves. What is your dark and silent eyes. What is your small, small hands. What is you as a stranger every morning. What is trees. What is her breathing almost imperceptibly. What is the hot night air and the nearness of the ocean. What is nothing that I really understand. These things in their strangeness, their immensity, their distance, remind me I cannot swallow them, I cannot comprehend them, yet they hold me in their gravity, drawing me to them from a distance I cannot cross. Aporia. Bridges. But you see, the problem lays in my appetite. Beneath your skin, there is a depth that I cannot know, I’ll admit this, happily - there is the infinitude of your potential, your loves and fears and choices, thoughts, cares, emptinesses, all of those frightful things that make you and I others, and this is as it should be and as it should remain, yet my desire (desire is too kind – I am just a lusty boy) insists that I cross that space, that I devour you. The arch of your back, your innocent eyes bright cheeks your smallness I long to wrap myself around or inside or and into within and immersed and not alone and silent and next to and always “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,” and yet I, like Keats, know that I cannot possess you in any real sense. Any semblance of my possessing you only exists in my imagination, for I must first imagine that you are not infinite and this is a lie. My possessing you can only happen in an unreal space. My possessing you requires that I deny or destroy the beauty that first drew me towards you. What makes you beautiful is that there is more to you than what I can receive, I am, “‘held’ by something that binds us only in it’s not quite-arriving” (Milbank) and to force that something to arrive is impossible unless dreamt which is then false, and this falseness, in a very real sense (a perceived sense), destroys that which was beautiful by refusing to acknowledge its excess. Simone Weil says that, “distance is the soul of the beautiful”, she understands that, “The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful. As long as one can go on conceiving, wishing, longing, the beautiful does not appear. That is why in all beauty we find contradiction, bitterness and absence which are irreducible”. She says all I am trying to say. “The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.” B, you are beautiful, and the desire of my heart is to see you as you are but my flesh is strong and longs to tear into you, knowing it will destroy you, knowing it is not even you, I desire to consume you, to strip you of that infinite depth which is yours as given by God and to hold it inside of myself. God grant me the strength to know her only and always as beautiful.
C is for Consume (don't forget consummate)
What is perhaps merely being itself. What is your eyes with tears knowing you are loved. What is you never looking more so than turning a smile. What is a poem I do not understand. What is strange. What is familiar. What is the late sunlight through bodies of water. What is the crevice of your neck. What is the sound of voices in harmony. What is the strength of tigers. What is the crush of waves. What is your dark and silent eyes. What is your small, small hands. What is you as a stranger every morning. What is trees. What is her breathing almost imperceptibly. What is the hot night air and the nearness of the ocean. What is nothing that I really understand. These things in their strangeness, their immensity, their distance, remind me I cannot swallow them, I cannot comprehend them, yet they hold me in their gravity, drawing me to them from a distance I cannot cross. Aporia. Bridges. But you see, the problem lays in my appetite. Beneath your skin, there is a depth that I cannot know, I’ll admit this, happily - there is the infinitude of your potential, your loves and fears and choices, thoughts, cares, emptinesses, all of those frightful things that make you and I others, and this is as it should be and as it should remain, yet my desire (desire is too kind – I am just a lusty boy) insists that I cross that space, that I devour you. The arch of your back, your innocent eyes bright cheeks your smallness I long to wrap myself around or inside or and into within and immersed and not alone and silent and next to and always “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,” and yet I, like Keats, know that I cannot possess you in any real sense. Any semblance of my possessing you only exists in my imagination, for I must first imagine that you are not infinite and this is a lie. My possessing you can only happen in an unreal space. My possessing you requires that I deny or destroy the beauty that first drew me towards you. What makes you beautiful is that there is more to you than what I can receive, I am, “‘held’ by something that binds us only in it’s not quite-arriving” (Milbank) and to force that something to arrive is impossible unless dreamt which is then false, and this falseness, in a very real sense (a perceived sense), destroys that which was beautiful by refusing to acknowledge its excess. Simone Weil says that, “distance is the soul of the beautiful”, she understands that, “The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful. As long as one can go on conceiving, wishing, longing, the beautiful does not appear. That is why in all beauty we find contradiction, bitterness and absence which are irreducible”. She says all I am trying to say. “The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.” B, you are beautiful, and the desire of my heart is to see you as you are but my flesh is strong and longs to tear into you, knowing it will destroy you, knowing it is not even you, I desire to consume you, to strip you of that infinite depth which is yours as given by God and to hold it inside of myself. God grant me the strength to know her only and always as beautiful.
C is for Consume (don't forget consummate)
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
detachment
Two ways of renouncing material posessions:
To give them up with a view to some spiritual advantage.
To Conceive of them and feel them as conducive to spiritual well-being (for example: hunger, fatigue and humiliation cloud the mind and hinder meditation) and yet to renounce them.
Only the second kind of renunciation means nakedness of spirit.
To give them up with a view to some spiritual advantage.
To Conceive of them and feel them as conducive to spiritual well-being (for example: hunger, fatigue and humiliation cloud the mind and hinder meditation) and yet to renounce them.
Only the second kind of renunciation means nakedness of spirit.
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