Writers of Conscience

I’ve been thinking about the basic decency of writers like Peter Weiss and Heinrich Böll, which is so evident in their work, whether or not one agrees with all of their words and opinions.  As young men, they were witnesses to the cauldron of German fascism and to World War II, though Weiss, in exile, was spared as close a view as Böll.  Both also witnessed the divided post-war world, the struggles in the Third World against European and American colonialism, the continuing political repression in Eastern Europe, the oppressiveness and spiritual vacancy of Western capitalism and the struggle of artists and activists to overcome it.  Through it all, they managed to be people of conscience, of decency, which was, and is, a hard thing thing to—both in their day and in our own.  To be decent just means to be human, but that doesn’t mean it is easy in today's world.

Above the Sea

Caspar David Friedrich - Blick auf die Ostsee

They climbed the stair, and sat them down on the green grass awhile watching the ocean coming in over the sand and the rocks, and Ralph said: "I will tell thee, sweetling, that I am grown eager for the road; though true it is that whiles I was down yonder amidst the ripple of the sea I longed for naught but thee, though thou wert beside me, and thy joyous words were as fire to the heart of my love. But now that I am on the green grass of the earth I called to mind a dream that came to me when we slept after the precious draught of the Well: for methought that I was standing before the porch of the Feast-hall of Upmeads and holding thine hand, and the ancient House spake to me with the voice of a man, greeting both thee and me, and praising thy goodliness and valiancy. Surely then it is calling me to deeds, and if it were but morning, as it is now drawing towards sunset, we would mount and be gone straightway."

                                                                                             —William Morris, The Well at the World’s End

The World is a Revelation . . .

Alles, was wir erfahren, ist eine Mitteilung. So ist die Welt in der Tat eine Mitteilung, Offenbarung des Geistes. Die Zeit ist nicht mehr, wo der Geist Gottes verständlich war. Der Sinn der Welt ist verloren gegangen. Wir sind beim Buchstaben stehngeblieben. Wir haben das Erscheinende über der Erscheinung verloren.

Ehemals war alles Geistererscheinung, jetzt sehn wir nichts als tote Wiederholung, die wir nicht verstehn. Die Bedeutung der Hieroglyphe fehlt. Wir leben noch von der Frucht beßrer Zeiten.

                                                                                                           —Novalis, Neue Fragmente

Everything we experience is a message. So the world is indeed a communication, a revelation of the Spirit. We no longer live in a time when the Spirit of God is comprehensible. The meaning of the world has been lost. We stopped at the letter. We have mistaken the image for the manifestation.

In the past, everything was a spiritual phenomenon; now we see nothing but dead repetition, which we don’t understand. The meaning of the hieroglyph is missing. We are still living on the fruits of better times.

All of this is true, and yet, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness . . .” (Romans 8:26)  We were made to read the revelation of the Spirit in the world.  But which of us is willing to go into that inner desert—to listen quietly in that arduous but necessary silence?

Let Us Go to That Country Where Dwells the Beloved

The servant Kabîr sings: "O Sadhu! finish your buying and selling, have done with your good and your bad: for there are no markets and no shops in the land to which you go."

                                                                                              —Kabîr, Song LXXIII, tr. Rabindranath Tagore

Desert and Mountains

I have lived most of my life surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert and spent time in all the great deserts of the Western U.S.  I immediately learned to love the desert upon encountering it as a child.  My love only grew as I learned to understand its diversity, its synergies, and its connections to the biomes bordering it: the relict forests (that retreated to the cooler, wetter slopes and tops of great, rugged mountains as the basins became dry and hot after the last ice ages), the riparian zones created by rivers and streams that came down from the mountains and cut through the arid landscape, and the great grasslands with their reliable patterns of rainfall, which gradually replaced the true desert at its norther-and-easterly limits.  In the desert itself, the rain was fickle, but essential. Each year the landscape would be shaped by the unpredictable patterns of precipitation.  Spotty rains of the monsoon season would create floods in one place and leave others untouched.

I saw the ways in which plants and animals adapted to living in a land of scarce water; and how, if left undisturbed, the desert that sustained them always remained a land of inexhaustible variety.  As a child, I marveled at the strangeness of the devil’s claw seed pods, which seemed like objects from another planet--or perhaps they truly were the devil’s claws.  I would look out on the desert in spring, or after the rains, and see a million flowers that had opened in an instant, many for only one short day or night.  I was full of awe, tinged with a sense of disbelief, at the sheer size of the vine that produced a melon known as the buffalo gourd.  The vine would grow impossibly fast, adding meters of grey-green foliage almost overnight.  And by the end of its season, nothing would be left but tangled, dead tendrils and bright yellow little gourds with an odd smell.  I remember learning about the tiny yucca moths, the only insects that could fertilize the yucca—the desert lily—with its great clusters of white flowers, and I remember examining dried yucca pods in the fall and finding the remnants of seeds eaten by the moths’ larvae, who always left some intact so that the collaboration between yucca and moth could continue.

I knew all of this was magical, but also fragile: that a single bulldozer was capable of leveling acres of desert for some new development, that cactus poached from a site or region might not return in my lifetime, and that a clear-cut relict forest would be gone forever.  I also knew that a grave where the ancestors slept could not be restored once it was desecrated, plundered for artifacts.  Tire tracks didn’t disappear in an arid landscape, and overgrazing reduced areas of biological diversity to mere sand dunes dotted with half-buried mesquite bushes.

I learned that nature is sacred: that the mountains are sacred, the rocks are sacred, the desert woodrat’s ungainly nest is sacred, and that each life is precious and necessary for the well-being all.

Judge Not

The French writer Léon Bloy wrote something like, “The friends of Jesus see all around them the modern Christians, and it is thus that they are able to picture hell.” (Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne)  So many people who claim to be Christian have no trouble ignoring the simple command that Jesus repeated over and over, forcefully and unambiguously: do not judge.  They get worked up over what other people are doing—usually things that Jesus, in fact, didn’t seem particularly concerned about—but think this command doesn’t apply to them.  Instead of following Jesus’ example, his words: “Father forgive them,” “Neither do I condemn you,” “Judge not,” “Do not condemn,” “I did not come to judge the world,” etc. etc., they are always the ones to “cast the first stone,” and to act like it is their personal religious duty to do so.  What is the source of this perversity that drives people to disregard so clear a command, and become so invincibly self-righteous?  Jesus preached love.  Where does all the hate come from?  No one was more about mercy, forgiveness, and not judging others than Jesus.  He reserved his harsh words for hypocrites, for those who thought they were better than everyone else, because he knew that no one had the right to condemn another.  Yet so many Christians refuse to acknowledge this basic message—and seem to have no trouble preaching its exact opposite!

The Cosmic Dance

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

                                                                                     —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation