Temptation

Brother Jonas once told me that the bad spirit normally doesn't do anything remarkable, out of the ordinary. No pea soup, no vomiting, no screaming blasphemies (my dramatization). No, he just shows us something and says, "look." And that begins everything.

Sometimes it's all consuming - like a black pit that swallows you up, that entices you with every delightful possibility, promising perfect ecstasy, until it seems impossible, inhumane, that you would ever refuse. I have felt that at least once, in the sense that an impulse - a powerful, all but irresistible impulse - arose from within me but not from me. But that scares you. It scared me half to death. That can put you on full alert - "Something is not right," you realize, your blood runs cold, and you jump to the solution of penance. If you know, you can defend, and once you call upon the good spirit, the battle is all but won - for now.

More often, it's quiet, subtle, promising nothing but beauty if you just watch. Like seeing a diseased, worm-eaten corpse become healthy, beautiful, full-blooded, seductive, life-giving, exalting, domineering, promising. Will you feed it with attention? Or let it starve? If you feed it, see above. If not, it quiets down again to be a splinter in your mind, sometimes calling for attention, other times remaining still, broadcasting the signal of indefinite pleasure.

The second is by far more dangerous. It lulls you into complacency, pride, self-reliance. "I have fought against it and won many times, therefore it is not truly a threat. I can dismiss it, for it is nothing to me any more." Reasonable. Understandable. False. Because there is good, and there is evil, and those two powers are far, far greater than we are. In my experience, the powers of evil are far more effective than good, because the good spirit respects my freedom, and the bad spirit is always seeking to make me bind my freedom by any means necessary. I do not know the power of God by experience.

That is the struggle of the initiate. Sages say that this struggle ends in some sense once we experience enlightenment, but the only way to enlightenment (but is this even really true?) is through struggle. Or perhaps a better way of putting it: understanding, acceptance, peace, and letting the self be what it is.

I feel myself divided, in conflict, at war. Is that an illusion? Is the only reality perfect wholeness? Is the perception of the divided self proof of a profound lack of understanding? I would say I know only one thing, but faith is not knowledge. So I cling to only one thing and lament my ignorance: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. 

All Saints' Clarity

Nothing you have truly longed for will come to be. You can't be a musician, a monk, or a priest. Very soon you will be a cripple. Despair seems reasonable. Are you going to kill yourself? 
No. 
Why not? 
Because my life is not my own and we are forbidden to kill ourselves; because the selfish cowardice of suicide still repels me; because I can still find, experience, and chase after beauty; and because my suicide would hurt people I love very badly. When I think about others, I can't really, seriously, entertain notions of killing myself. 
What will you do instead? 
Convert and follow Jesus of Nazareth. 
How?
By hating sin: abandoning self-pity, self-loathing, making peace with lust, and rising above sloth. And by loving good. There was a vision, an instant of clarity I had during the homily; a pure-hearted longing for holiness alone, all other things stripped away; and the proof this can be done is the Saint. The witness of the saints is the needed proof that this way of life is possible. And I know that it's beautiful. A single minded devotion to live in and for love. To follow Christ while holding nothing back. Just for an instant, there was a flicker of joy. The "all things are passing, God never changes" type. And it made me want to want it. 

I don't know how the transfiguration of suffering to redemption works; but if the pain I freely accept could bring just one person to heaven, everything would be worth it. There is nothing I would not endure if I could know it would make a difference. Can it? I wrestle with that unceasingly. There is no answer for me except belief or unbelief. But it's literally either that or suicide, and I've already ruled that out. So holiness it is.

So what will you do? 
Get an apartment, and devote myself to penance, prayer, art, and writing. Live that way as long as I can, accept the humiliation of being a cripple with some measure of grace, and accept in the end whatever death I am given. 

Seeking the Good

What I want is the truth. What I want is knowledge, not opinion: έπιστήμη, scientia. That which necessarily is, what cannot not-be. If it turns out that the good can be known only by faith, so be it; but I want to know that it can be known only by faith. Till then, I will hone my powers of  thought and relentlessly scrutinize any possibility.

Several candidates appear for the title 'good': existence, pleasure, that which we choose for the sake of itself, and flourishing; i.e., the development and exercise of a being's capabilities. That last definition is my own. I still like it, because I am overly fond of my own opinions, but a friend criticized it soundly on the following grounds: development of a being's capabilities reduces to the exercise of a being's capabilities; since everything a being does is an exercise of its capabilities, therefore no matter what it does it is accomplishing the good. Therefore the definition is worthless, in the sense that understanding the good should enable us to set an aim or purpose for our actions, or at least understanding our actions.

Second, existence. Aquinas makes a case for this when he equates the good with being (he also identifies it with the fullness of being. The two statements may or may not be equivalent). This seems to fail for most of the reasons above. If not, consider: every choice and every action is made by an existing being. They are made real, incarnate, by that being. Therefore insofar as they equally exist, they are all equally good, and no choice or way of life could be set above or apart from another as superior or degenerate, even when they completely contradict one another, as they often and manifestly do. 

Third, pleasure. This is almost the most attractive of all positions for me, not least because for a Christian (and I know hints of this by experience), true ecstasy is found in the contemplation of and being caught up in the triune life of God. It's also the hardest to refute, because my counterargument is simply this: people find pleasure in cruelty. Torturers, rapists, serial killers, Jane Austen protagonists. Or even on a more mundane level, the sorts of controlling, domineering people who enjoy flaunting their superiority or privilege. I know or have encountered plenty of such people. Lucretius bears witness to this type in general when he writes how sweet and pleasant it is to lie on the grass, watching while a ship wrecks itself on the coast, thinking to yourself how nice it is that you are spared such things. The very definition of Fridge Horror. 

Or a second counterargument, addiction: intoxication, food, and sex are all pleasurable; so why is what we call addiction to these things bad? 

To the second argument, I would say these ways of life are not genuinely pleasant. Consider gluttony and pornography. Before, mostly during, and after, there is nothing but pain: shame, guilt, self-disgust, self-loathing, seeking to forget, trying to numb, etc. I do not struggle with alcoholism or drug addiction, but I imagine similar patterns are operative. 

I regard the answer to the second counterargument  sufficient for me, but I don't regard it as demonstrative, because I don't see how it is yet (obviously if anyone does, please tell me). The first counterargument I have much more trouble with. The only possible ways out would be deny a rapist takes pleasure in rape (which seems absurd - granted, I don't struggle with rapacious tendencies myself, but the idea of a woman screaming and crying while I have my way seems anything but fun; on the other hand, rape seems to be most of all about domination and control, and those things certainly are very pleasant. Therefore etc.), or argue that such things are driven by compulsion, and that compulsion is not pleasant. Both of those seem to fail for manifestly obvious reasons. 

A way out might be Aristotle's definition: That which we choose for the sake of itself, and not for anything else. Sure, but what is that? Well, he's going to tell us: Happiness. Alright, but what is happiness? And so we return full circle. Because some will say wealth, honor, pleasure, contemplation, etc. Aristotle's own answer seems to be pleasure, understood as contemplation, the highest pleasure. 

Aristotle (and Plato, who seems to have a similar view) can hold this opinion because they were conversant in bodily, spirited, and intellectual forms of pleasure, and being deeply experienced in all three (they were all rich Athenian noblemen, and I can only imagine the parties they attended, not to mention enjoying wealth, honors, privilege, and staggering intellectual genius), chose philosophic contemplation as the most pleasant. 

That method - an ascent from the lowest, bestial sorts of pleasures to the highest, culminating, in the Christian view of being caught up in divine love and sharing in the love of others - might be a way forward, but I still don't have an objection that demonstrably rejects those lower pleasures as bad while holding pleasure as that which we choose for the sake of itself and not for the sake of anything else. 

And there I remain. 

Stuck. 

The Holy Eucharist III

Christ is the center of history and the cross is at the center of Christ. This is another way of saying that the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the primordial center of all things, for the Mass is that same consecration, breaking and immolation of His Passion, made manifest in all times and in all places. It was present in the Old Testament by means of shadows and figures; in praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God, the Passover lambs slaughtered in Egypt foretold the reuniting of divine and human; Christ's death and resurrection accomplished that within history - i.e. time and space - and that sacrificial Act brought the Church into being, as blood and water flowed from the side of a dying god; symbolizing the union of divine and human (in a way, the Church, like Her Bridegroom, is a hypostatic union), it is in this way the Eucharist makes the Church. It literally brings Her into existence. 

Thus the Eucharist is primordial: it is in the beginning, it is the Covenant, it is nuptial, one-flesh union. It is the center of a Christian metaphysics, wherein the true is free because the true is covenant. It is both history, for we can point to a temporo-spatial point where it 'began', and it is mystery, for it transcends the very limits of the time and space that would seem to be its boundaries. It is an icon of divine revelation, but unlike an icon it is without limit. Now, in the age of the sacramental,  history and mystery become one, and they become one through the Eucharist.

More specifically, they become one through consecration: the hallowing, breaking, offering, and immolating of a pure and holy Victim; present also is the union of past, present, and future, for Christ as Antitype of the Old Law hearkens back to it, and His broken and immolated Body and Blood, offered to the Father in praise and thanksgiving, are really, truly, substantially, and sacramentally present under the appearance of bread and wine - vere, realiter, substantialiter, et sacramentaliter - in our present, which itself prefigures and foreshadows the Wedding Feast of the Lamb Who was slain at the consummation of all things. And all this occurs in consecration. By breaking the bread, Christ was offering Himself to be broken; the bread, consumed as food, is really His love and obedience to the Father. And because the Eucharist is now the ordering principle of reality, already accomplished but not yet complete, the same is true of us who celebrate the Eucharist, whether our Eucharistic role is clerical or lay. We, corporately (i.e. bodily) members of the Bride, share a transfiguring union with Christ our Head - what He is, fully human and truly divine, we also become, and this through the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which takes from us our false nature and restores us to His image and likeness.

History, mystery, past, present, future, Apocalypse - all unite and are one in a still, small voice, when a priest holds a small host and whispers, "This is My Body, broken for you."

The Holy Eucharist II

Like the Word of God, the Eucharist is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is the prayer of prayers, the sacrifice of sacrifices, the highest action the Church can render; on the other hand, it is the very action that brings the Church into being, and so is prior to Her. The Church draws Her life and source from the Eucharist, for She was born from the side of Christ at His Paschal Sacrifice; as blood and water flowed from a dying god giving life to His people, so too divinity and humanity have been reconciled and reunited in Him. Thus He is the Head and His Body is one. By means of sacrifice, human will has once again adhered to the divine will - from the Garden of Eden-turned-death, to the Garden of Gethsemane-made-life, that drama is both the mystery of Christ's Body the Church, and Christ's Mystical Body sacrificed and made lifegiving food for us. 

All this is chiefly drawn from, mediated by, and seen through the Church's ancient tradition and manner of worship. In the ancient Roman anaphora, the mystery of faith, the mystery of the Church, and the mystery of the Eucharist are interwoven, mutually illuminating, and wholly ordered to the praise and glory of the Holy Trinity. The rite is structured, bearing the stamp of austere Roman law, but it is the structure of an ecstatic act of worship. The mystery of faith is the simple affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again from the dead, and will come again; but it is transfigured in long paean of communion sacrifice, the anamnesis of the Roman Canon. 

This structure shows the identity and dignity of the Christian, for it reveals the will of God - Him loving us in eternity and in time. The first part of the Canon makes repeated reference to the sacrifice of praise, which refers both to the Act of Christ on the cross, making the Church to be, and the action of the priest, re-presenting that same sacrifice for the praise and glory of His Name, culminating in the sacred banquet, feeding on the Holy Eucharist Itself.

These two motion are constantly informing each other through the Canon, like two voices in polyphonic music, but there is a third voice - a transfigured mystery of faith. The first was the simple affirmation of the life and death of Christ; the second, a hymn to the Holy Trinity: "Per Ipsum..." The act of faith, through which the Body of Christ is professed and the Mystical Body of Christ worshiped, adored, and consumed, leads us to the interweaving, ever-holy life of the Holy Trinity - the life of perfect communion. From these three elements - faith, Church, Eucharist , each with their own structure and logic, we can see the movement of man from death in sin to life in God All-Holy, for the praise and glory of His name.

The Holy Eucharist I

Most properly, 'the Eucharist' refers to two realities: 1) the ritual representation of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary, the one eternal Act that brings the Church into being; 2) the Sacred Species, offered to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, and distributed to the faithful as the medicine of immortality. The Church confesses this to be the Flesh and Blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. Put in contemporary terms, the Order of Mass is a ritual, sacrificial offering in an unbloody manner, and the Blessed Sacrament is the Sacrament of Sacraments. The Eucharist is a sacrifice for it is the very same sacrifice of the Cross, and it is a sacrament because it accomplishes what it signifies - the triumph of the Son of God over sin and death, and His Flesh and Blood, fruit of that sacrifice, nourishing His Bride the Church and leading Her to participate in divine life.

When created, man fell almost instantly into rebellion, twisting his will against the will of the Father. Man was profaned, and from the instant of the Fall recognized his fallenness and need to return to God. This was tried first on man's own initiative: sacrifice, a setting-apart, a making-holy, that God eventually hallowed and required from His People. From the beginning (Abel) it was a bloody sacrifice, slaughtering a helpless and therefore innocent animal, burning some of its flesh and consuming the rest. An intuition that through sacrifice, man could return to God.

At first carnal, physical, and unspiritual (e.g. the guardianship of the Mosaic Law), in the Psalms and Prophets arose the conviction that the true sacrifice to God was a humble and contrite heart - i.e. a sacrifice on the order of the spirit, which is to say the order of reality. God is spirit, so union and reunion with Him must be on the order of spirit, but man is also carnal, so that reunion must be carnal as well. This tension could not be resolved within the limits of the Old Covenant.

Only in the Word-made-Flesh does the solution appear. As fully, integrally man, Christ unifies His flesh, His mind, His will to God; and as truly God, He gives those united by faith to Him a share of His own divinity, so that each believer can renounce evil and Satan, being conformed to Christ through the renewal of the mind.

This was accomplished, fittingly, through sacrifice. Adam severed his will from God, and death was the result. Christ united His will to the Father as far as it was possible for a man to do - unto and through suffering and torturous death. Through this act, humanity is restored and made holy again before the Lord. 

The Sacrifice of Christ, as the antitype or fulfillment of the sacrifices of the Old Covenant, fittingly included a ritual meal - as seen at the Last Supper. Building on principles of hospitality, so important to the ancient world, a shared meal was the source and summit of human connection, human communion. But in the case of Christ, the communion is between man and God, so it was fitting that the means of the sacrifice - the Body and Blood of the Lord - should become the source of the communion meal, symbolized, figured by bread and wine, and being really, truly, substantially, and sacramentally present under those signs.

Thus the Eucharist is a sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. Not a different sacrifice, or a parallel sacrifice, or a new sacrifice, but the same act re-presented again for us; and the Eucharist is a sacrament, a mystery; for the power of God accomplishes through the words and actions of His bishops and priests what those words and actions signify - our redemption in Christ, culminating in Holy Communion with God and one another.

Nature. Grace. Integrity.

Our thirst for knowledge begins in the wonders of the natural world. But divine revelation is an unveiling, a piercing light into unhiddenness. In the beginning, the world ended. Nature turned against itself, a turn into corruption. A twisted spirituality, a warped intelligence, a rupture of disharmony defiled and shattered what was whole. Now, when we look at what we call nature - that which, seemingly of its own accord, happens for the most part - it cannot be seen in light of what it was. Our experience of the world is rooted in the world, and the world is fallen. Crashed. The Way reunites what was disparate, and being conformed in faith to the Word made flesh brings us back to divine life, takes from us our false nature, and restores to us our true image and likeness. The dark, narrow, and dangerous way of faith is a recovery of nature: harmony within our interior life, between man and woman, and even harmony with creation itself.

Because of where we begin, we cannot say what we were, for we are unable to transcend our origin. Space, time, matter, spirit - all these are part of the Fall. We cannot say they have been untainted by it, for all creation groans, and suffers the pains of childbirth. Once I was whole. Now I am broken. Our origin is obscure, hidden even to ourselves. The promise of faith and the experience of life illumined by the Resurrection of the New Covenant shows us what the divine life looks like - the conquest of our false nature, and the recovery of integrity - but even then it does not unveil our beginning, except through a glass darkly. Our experience is mediated by its fallen condition, so the only way to transcend that condition to experience the radically, utterly new. It is to taste the divine power, partake in the divine nature. Since God is love, love is that very teacher of the new experience. Love: a furious, molten, coursing spiritual passion, a consuming fire, the burning heat of which is the flourishing of others. It is an interior austerity that blossoms fecundity. It is a renunciation freeing us to possess what is truly real. The way of love leads to the cross, for we are baptized into His death, but the cross is the holiness of God encountering the power of darkness and death. The Resurrection is the fruit of that encounter. Death is written into the heart of nature, and through the Resurrection, death becomes undone. The life of love reveals that death is a lie and the power of the paschal mystery unveils its weakness.