Wickedness is an intricate net; and if someone is careless when partially entangled, he gets completely enmeshed.
This strikes me, to almost borrow a phrase from Cavell, as St. Mark’s religious interpretation of a perception he shares with Wittgenstein.
I read this recently in Tagore’s Gitanjali. Interestingly parallel to Paul’s famous lament late in Romans 7.
Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –
Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully –
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done,
That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
St. Luke ix. 14: — “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
Glory and Peace are coupled together with an “and” — ” and on earth peace ;” that Glory would not be sung alone, but Peace together with it. We will not, we may not skip the copulative; that couples together high and low. Heaven and earth, and in them God and man; but that which I respect specially. Glory and Peace must be sung together. If we sing Glory without Peace, we sing but to halves. No Glory on high will be admitted without Peace upon earth. No gift on His Altar, which is a special part of His glory, but “lay down your gift and there leave it, and first go your way and make peace on earth; ” and that done come again, and you shall then be accepted to give glory to Heaven, and not before. And O that we would go and do the like, have like regard of His glory that He hath of our peace. But this knot of Glory and Peace is against those that are still ever wrangling with one thing or other, and all for the glory of God forsooth, as if these two could not join — God could not have His glory if the Church were at peace, as if no remedy the Angels’ “and” must out.
Glory and Peace; but Glory first, and then Peace. There is much in the order. Glory to be first, else you change the clef, — the clef is in Glory, that the key of the song. That is to be first and before all. Peace to give place to her; Glory is the elder sister. And no Pax in terris, unless it be first considered how it will stand with Gloria in excelsis. To set Peace before Glory is to set earth above Heaven. Keep the order then, each in her place. So goeth the song; the Child born is God and man — God from on high, Man from the earth. They keep the right order in singing of Him; we to do the like, Heaven’s part ever to be first.
While I am no fan of The Message translation of the Bible, I did find this translation of John 1:14, in its flat-footed matter-of-factness, striking (H/T Jim Brinkerhoff). A nice turn to the thought of the season:
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.
Of this philosophical wonder it should be observed, because it bears on our ground of belief, that its tendency is not, like that of ordinary wonder, to diminish through familiarity, but rather the reverse. Awakened by the fact of being, necessarily involving the idea of being uncreated; also by the discovery of the immensity, and order, and movements, and adaptations of that around us which we call the cosmos, it increases as its object is dwelt upon till it becomes utter bewilderment. Whoever, therefore, recognizes all this, and accepts it as a reality, ought to have no difficulty on account of its strangeness merely, in accepting any form of the manifestation of being that may claim his acceptance. That there should be a future life under a different form cannot be more strange than that there should be a present life under its present form. That there should be a heaven hereafter cannot be more strange than that there should be a happy family here. That there should be a spiritual existence cannot be stranger than that there is a material existence. That there should be a personal God, infinite and holy, cannot be more strange than that we should be personal beings, as we are, and that there should be this multiform universe in which we find ourselves. Indeed I think we may say, that live as long as we may during the eternal ages, go where we may into the depths of infinite space, we shall never find a scene of things more strange and wonderful than we are in now.
From Mark Hopkins’ The Scriptural Idea of Man. Hopkins was a legendary teacher (he taught at Williams in the middle of the 19th century). Bliss Perry, in his winsome book, And Gladly Teach, talks of Hopkins’ power as a teacher.
No one can furnish an adequate definition of greatness, but Mark Hopkins, like Gladstone and Bismark, gave the beholder the instant impression of being in the presence of a great man. He had already become in his lifetime a legend, a symbol of teaching power: ‘Mark Hopkins on one end of a log, and a student on the other.’ [This line originated in a comment of James Garfield’s (one of Hopkins’ students): ‘A pine bench with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and me at the other is a good enough college for me.’–KDJ]
[His students] all agree that he was not, in the strict academic sense, a ‘scholar’; the source of his power was not in his knowledge of books. But that is an old story in the history of the world: ‘He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’ Any teacher can study books, but books do not necessarily bring wisdom, nor that human insight essential to consummate teaching skill…
To some men in class, no doubt, he seemed a philosopher without a system, a moralist indifferent to definitions. He was in truth a builder of character who could lay a stone wall without ever looking at a blue-print.
All of us recognized his immense latent power. ‘Half his strength he put not forth.’ Yet this apparently indolent wrestler with ideas–never dogmatic, never over-earnest, never seeming to desire converts to any creed or platform–was ceaselessly active in studying the members of each class and in directing, however subtly, the questions by which he sought to develop and test their individual capacity…
What is it to live, to think, in the present? How do I manage to be present to the present? How do I avoid experiencing now either as déjà vu or as the future past? Part of the answer is risk, I think. I have to stake myself wholly in the moment, not holding back a bit either backwards or forwards, so that what I was or what I will be somehow prevents my present exposure to the present. Johannes Climacus says–in effect–“No risk, no faith.” Why not, here, “No risk, no now”? Today is the day of salvation–or of damnation. Holding back now may save me from damnation, but it also dams me from salvation. Eventually, a life bereft of todays damns itself.
As to those people who are good and kind but are not believers, we cannot and must not judge them. The ways of the Lord are inscrutable; let us leave these good people entirely to his judgment and to the grace of his providence. He alone knows how and why he has built the argosy of humanity, and the small boat of each of us, such as it is.
Today begins the Nativity Fast. And so, a little verse from Auden. This is taken from the opening sections of “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”.
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 