“Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Moth & Mother
A moth is perched on the head of Mother Mary. Mother Mary is a four-inch tin icon that leans against the windowsill above our kitchen sink. Resting against the counter, I am pondering moths. A pseudo-Jungian idea pops into my mind that moths are merely the shadows torn from butterflies. The moth’s sooty streaks are the tell of their origins and the reason they clammer for the light. Annie Dillard once wrote about a moth and a flame being consummated into a union undividable (as I wrote that sentence I watched the title of the Dillard book walk further away from my memory as I begged it to come back). I do recall the charge I felt from reading about the homecoming between moth and flame. That ache for becoming one comes at a cost unknown. Dillard’s book was nonrequired reading in a theology course in graduate school and it set me ablaze. Her words burst with theopoetics that demanded I fall prostrate in devotional awe. After finishing the book (title, come back please!) and showing up early for class that day I remember asking evocative questions, raising wild ideas, and then dumbly waiting for my classmates to share their own lusty experiences with the text. This boldness was not my normal classroom behavior, but this was not the usual academic fodder. In time, many in the class admitted to not reading the book and those who had, found it dangerously slow. That moment left a bookmark in my education.
I awakened to the truth that a graduate course is nothing but an expensive book club. I have no regrets for the dimes it took to get me in the front door of that regal book club, but it is worth noting that every book club I have belonged to since then has been free, animated, and often accompanied by a sumptuous meal and paired with hoppy beverages. This is something to consider before tossing a costly line of credit into open and predatory educational waters. Fees and degrees dangle before you, get tangled, and ultimately distract all but the most vigilant from the education that transforms the mind, body, and spirit.
Expertise too readily hides behind office walls. There are still sages left in the ivory towers exercising their intellectual freedom and opening mystical doors for students lost in beige corridors. I consider myself in that lucky lot who stumbled into conversations with wise old owls who showed me a few trees to perch on. These divine appointments were like firecrackers dropped down the back of my shorts. They woke me up and taught me to pay attention to the present. Always leaving a mark on my education.
Over time a firecracker down the pants is not needed as often to wake me up. I take most of my cues from the grandeur of mundanity. A shift in sunlight can do it. The lazy sweep of a willow branch. The clap of a child. A glance at a moth contemplating the image of the God-Bearer….and may this moth’s direct union with Light be swift (Holy the Firm, the Dillard title came back just in time!).
These subtle noticings are enough of an education to stir me, to entice me, to call me further in.
New Foundations
“Abba Moses asked Abba Silvanus, ‘Can a man lay a new foundation every day?’ The old man said, ‘If he works hard, he can lay a new foundation at every moment.’”
― Abba Silvanus
What foundation are you able to lay today? Are you biding your time on Netflix and popping beer tops? Are you unemployed, praying your empty pantry will be restocked? Or worse still, are you sick and struggling with your next breath?
The pandemic is producing a reality show of absurd experiences. The poor and marginalized have it the worst. The proportions of those who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color who are sick and dying is unfair and is a damning account of all our systems. The disregard for the well being of their bodies pollutes the land of the free and forecloses the home of the brave. The rich have escaped to vacation homes behind a moat of wealth, waiting for a vaccine. The middle class are holed up at home, working on screens that mirror back the same lifeless expression.
The absurdity is real.
Prayers are going unanswered and folks are wondering if God is on a ventilator. I reckon this is true. The God of the modern age, the be right rather than merciful God, the God of pure unfiltered dualistic reason, the God whose favor depends on how well you prop up the empire…this god is not going to make it through the pandemic. Or maybe even this email. The capital G of this god has already dropped to a little g, soon this god will be gone.
The death of this god is necessary. A new version of the god of certainty and empire will replace the one on hospice, it is a pattern well documented in holy texts across traditions. This pattern of a micromanaging god emerges because there is too much freedom when one lives inside of a Divine Mystery who offers mercy willy-nilly to both the becoming and the unbecoming. A Mystery who makes the “sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Mt 5:45) What kind of foundation is this to build a life on?
Abba Silvanus believes it is the only foundation to build a life on. A 4th Century Palestian monk, Abba Silv as his pals called him (my unproven assumption), offers the option of laying a ‘new foundation at every moment’. The firm foundation of endless beginnings is only possible with the eyes of mercy and forgiveness. When you see through the lens of each, unified in one vision, absurdity can be forgiven and the suffering of Reality can be endured. This is what it means to continually hit refresh on Reality, to allow each moment to be its own foundation, to see with the third eye of grace.
Another monk, Abba Bessarion, speaks of this seeing at the point of his death, “The monk ought to be as the Cherubim and the Seraphim: all eye.” (p. 42, Sayings of the Desert Fathers). This draws Henry David Thoreau (well versed in monkish ways) to the center stage of this absurd reality show, who picks up the mic that Abba Bessarion dropped with his ‘all eye’ perspective, and speaks to what he carries in his own flesh; from vivid dreams down into experiments in living and laying new foundations.“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” (p.303, Walden)
A shift in perspective can widen your gaze and loosen your tongue to form new questions – What foundations quench my thirst for a life? What foundations wreak of death’s odor? And what is mine to do with this refreshed sight to lay new foundations in every moment?
In whatever absurd segment of reality you find yourself in, I have no answers for you. But do I have dreams for your foundation…
If you or your beloveds are sick, you are called to tend to them and yourselves. I will pray for your well being and restored health. A few of you are called to lay new foundations to replace the old systems of oppression. I will pray fortitude, resilience, and humility guide the long road ahead. We will join you when you are ready for us. More of you are called to lay new foundations in your communities of belonging. I will pray that your capacity for non-judgement and compassion holds strong even while cracking. All of us are called to lay new foundations every moment within ourselves for the transformation of the whole. The personal readies the universal. The universal readies the personal.
I pray that you become ‘all eye’.
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