A little more Eliot.

This was supposed to be a comment to my own earlier Eliot post, but as usual, it grew. A lot of the things I have been thinking, praying, reading and quoting about seem to be drawing together a bit.

I had run away screaming from Eliot some years ago, and now, from this side of the divide, I'm finding so much to relate to and marvel over, especially on the subject of doubt/renunciation/surrender as a path to God - a faith that can look like despair; a certain kind of holy despair of our own self-created notions of God.

I just read The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong this weekend, which, being a theological memoir of sorts, is organized around the first poem from Eliot's Ash Wednesday. Eliot's hardness around these concepts is likely more than just a literary conceit, and that troubles me a little bit. Truth without love is cruelty, etc, and several years ago I read these lines as cruel and bitter. However, I've recently come to realize that love without truth is its own subtle cruelty, and in that light, being warned by Eliot that parts of the path are lined with bitter herbs seems like an austere but true love.

Lately, and continuously, I have been experiencing the death of my minor gods that I had named God. This poem speaks to me from the vantage point of a soul who has just finished mourning his lost Ego. The hopelessness and weariness bearing down on every line comes from a realization that, as Gertrude Stein said: "There is no answer. There never has been an answer. There never will be an answer. That's the answer."

Of course the Answer is Love, or God, or Christ, however you want to say it. But there is no answer on a rational level, which is what some of us humbugs have been slobbering for, to the point where we have sometimes obscured our way to the true Answer.

After thrashing around looking for my own answers, there came a very difficult and very painful stage. I began it quite a while ago...and it is still going on. Back in November in my old blog, I began to accept that maybe I needed to surrender to God, before I could know him. And that was really scary. That sounded like the "tie your mind behind your back" theology I had run from, the animatronic "ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die" that I saw as the damning first principle of organized religion and the atrocities it has sponsored throughout history. I desperately didn't want to be stiff-necked and miss out on God that way. But to "surrender to God" by bludgeoning myself into belief seemed wrong as well. I couldn't bear to lie and say that I believed in "God" as defined by this or that organization - that felt like a worse sacrilege. I worried that I had painted myself into a corner, and set myself in an unbearable position. Deny God and be damned...Lie about God and be damned. It was a very lonely time.

Karen Armstrong wrote something that grabbed my heart when I read it:

The Middle English word "beleven" originally meant "to love"; and the Latin "credo ("I believe") probably derived from the phrase "cor do": "I give my heart."
Saint Anslem of Canterbury had written, "Credo ut intellegam," usually translated "I believe in order that I may understand." I had always assumed that this meant that I had to discipline my rebellious mind and force it to bow to the official orthodoxy, and that as a result of this submission, I would learn to understand a higher truth...But no..."Credo ut intellegam" should be translated "I commit myself in order that I may understand."

All of this, added to what I am learning from Merton, and what I have been digesting from The Cloud of Unknowing, added to what has been shown to my soul in the few times I have achieved stillness, has brought forth a gentle but stark understanding of so many things that troubled me before: what did it mean to empty yourself, what did it mean to be broken before God, what is obedience, what it the responsible suspension of the rational faculty, what does it mean to "make yourself low before the mystery"?

I can't say I know these answers, but having finally reached a peak of spiritual exhaustion, like a child who is all cried out and limp and damp after a fearsome tantrum, I do feel strange and still and quiet and empty and docile...for now. And in this state, I feel as if maybe I understand a little what it is that we are asked to give up, and what we are allowed to keep. I know that I am not obliged by God to believe a single thing, though I know I will be obliged to do many, many things. There is no "article of faith" to pledge allegiance to. I am called solely to Love, in all of its hideousness and beauty. I am called to love for the sake of Love, to Love God, and to do God's will. Another Merton fragment:

"If you want to know what is meant by "God's will" in man's life, this is one way to get a good idea of it. "God's will" is certainly found in anything that is required of us in order that we may be united with one another in love."

This of course, is what has been being said for thousands and thousands of years in nearly every major religion. Compassion, and love, for their own sake. Any other theology is in service of this basic tenet. Every path, discipline, spiritual exercise, practice, yoga, law, virtue, or work has as its End this tenet. I am not even embarassed that I managed to know this for so long without being convinced of it. It makes me so happy that I no longer need to figure out a single thing about God, nor do I need to figure out if he even exists at all. I don't need to understand Him, or even believe in Him, to be able to love Him.

To give up, absolutely, all my hope for understanding, all my hope for an unshakable, empirically justifiable belief in God, all of my straining and suffering and longing, this is a very stark poverty. The scariest words of Jesus: "If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell." have begun to make sense. If I am not doing God's will because I am waiting until I find a God I can believe in without reservation, I am going to damn myself, in whatever sense of the word "damned" you'd like to use. My eye and my hand, or my hope and my faith, are good in and of themselves, but must not ever stand in the way of God's will.

This is what was meant by the saying I had long ago dismissed as nihilist: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

To be emptied of hope, faith, and understanding seems like such a horrifying prospect. And it is. But the joy in this realization is this: whenever I read of a saint's "Dark night of the Soul" or spiritual desert, my heart was crushed. They would say things like "I could no longer believe in anything and nothing made sense, but I still believed, and then I came through it, because I believed anyway, even when I could not see." I think now I have a better idea of what they meant. Through these moments of absolute intellectual and spiritual despair, the thread that held them and kept them from hurtling through space was not a witless rote affirmation of a truth they couldn't see. (The image that has always come to mind is a little Natalie Wood near the end of Miracle on 34th Street rolling her eyes, chewing her gum, and chanting in a listless monotone..."I believe, I believe, it's silly but I believe...")The thread that held them was their love and desire for God, even when it seemed He was an illusion. The Beatle was right...all you need is love. :)

None of this is flippant. This is not a loophole or an easy way out...on the contrary. I won't go into paragraphs and paragraphs about how very hard it is to love truly and purely, with a Divine and not a petty broken human love, because I know you know.


Anyhow, the Eliot. I want to give you the first and the last of Ash Wednesday.


I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this mans gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there
is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy on us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.


VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.