Lenten Thoughts and Liturgy
I have been silent, out of sorrows, and deep exhaustion. Lenten thoughts abide in Lenten lands. We find ourselves, those who inhabit the dregs end of the West, in a mundane, curated world that has lost the way of the Cross, which is the only path to life. This reign of quantity, of metrics and algorithms, the gnosis of anti-Christ, crows with arrogant certitudes, the vainglorious cock-of-the-walk that promenades in the virtual courts of social media and craven academe. I’ve been pondering Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, which offers diagnostic probity to spiritual disease that is taken for Enlightenment. A praxis of calculation and coercion, of ideological fundamentalisms and utilitarian dogma, threatens to envelop with violence and distraction our fractured being, even as technology expands and worms its way into every private thought, whispering its evil tongue, and banishing the solitude necessary for the plenitude of Silence.
This war affects everyone, both the ignorant and the forgotten anawim, those poor who yearn and thirst for God.
Hear the words of McGilchrist:
'“Only the human soul is left to resist this process, being, unlike cognition, beyond “administrative control”; It is that part of us that intuits the divine, is in touch with unconscious knowledge and wisdom, and resists the banality of the desacralised, if not actually desecrated, world. As such it is a threat to the administered world, which responds with an otherwise inexplicable wish to crush and exterminate it.”
The Orwellian Doublespeak for this desire of the Machine to destroy the soul, evident in its religious rite of abortion, its murderous hate for child-like innocence, its contempt for solemn pieties and traditional joys, is called nowadays “protecting democracy.”
The Machine lacks true intellect, but it feeds on human ambitions, and perhaps those of other spiritual creatures. The engineers who both rule and are ruled by the Machine have a distinct stance, a way of attending, that sees very little. It is not receptive, it does not listen to the hidden words of Creation. It is logic-chopping, linear, contemptuous and dismissive of what it does not understand. It is too dim to know what it doesn’t know. And it calls those who intuit a surplus beyond its narrowly confined facts irrational, bigoted, the enemies who facilitate “disinformation.”
The object reduced to information is a reductionist phantom, but that is what the machine regards as real. Above all, mystery is a term for ignorance destined to vanish before the onslaught of calculation and method. At bottom, there is nothing but chance and atoms, those nineteenth-century fugitives unaware of the implications of quantum fields, or the perduring importance of form, that lost wisdom of Plato, Plotinus, and Aquinas.
In this flat world of consumption, of creation limited to the useful, the cosmos disappears, replaced with an ersatz, lying double. It is the same, but false. We live in the economy of the ersatz. Our lives suffer the indignity, and lack of beauty, that comes from the fusion of degraded reason with diabolic illusions.
McGilchrist says, “According to French philosopher Bertrand Vergely, `our world is not merely disenchanted, it is in the grip of a malaise’, one that is linked to our incapacity to wonder. We are curious about things, until we know enough to control them; but that is not the same as wonder at all – rather its opposite.”
We are curious, shrewd, far from the call to be truly human, which is identical to life in Christ.
The sophists have vanquished the vatic poet. The voice of the poet is silenced, or plays the harlot, creating jingles to sell the diminished creation, those shadow slaves, the products of our carefully managed and directed lusts.
The focus of our thought is constrained because we think in terms of linear systems, when linear thinking is inadequate to the task, the one we have forgotten, the only one, to be human, to be Christ, from which the life of the Garden flows.
The result is what David Bohm called “sustained incoherence.” Bohm explains: “If there is sustained incoherence, it just keeps going in spite of the fact that there is evidence which would show it’s incoherent.” From this comes persistent madness, which it then becomes the obligation of state propaganda to inculcate in the citizen reduced to cog in the machine, dependent slave, subject of the surveillance state.
And as McGilchrist notes, its manifestation is all around us. “I see widespread evidence of this strange mentality in corporations, governments, health systems and education – everywhere that management `culture’ holds sway – that when things go wrong it is never that we are travelling in the wrong direction, or have gone too far in what may once have been a right direction, only that we have not gone far enough.”
The soul is anesthetized by this programmatic appeal to Progress, this depraved changeling child of the optimisms of the Enlightenment. Progress now reveals itself not as a heroic break with superstition, but as jejune illusion that ends in the shabby, the wicked, anomie, and the celebration of vileness as iconic liberty. The wickedness itself is deadly dull, bureaucratized, instilled in departments of human resource, what a term, lacking respect for persons, of anything sacred, it is the logic of Heidegger’s “standing reserve” applied to humanity reduced to useful objects.
Callousness, and a certain repulsive superficiality ensue. Here, again, is McGilchrist: “Something noticeable has happened to our emotional range, which also illuminates how our values have been corrupted. It strikes me that, as a culture, we are losing the capacity for sorrow. Sorrow is a normal part of life, and nothing like anxiety and depression (in which, contrary to popular belief, a capacity for sorrow may be diminished). We have lost that sense of deep connexion and communion, eliciting feelings of longing, tenderness and compassion, and which is more prevalent than any other sense in the musical traditions of the whole world.”
Think of this, when you recollect the Lord’s beatitude, “blessed are those who mourn.”
Only a heart alive can accomplish that feat. To mourn is not a platitude, but a disposition of the soul. To mourn is to participate in the sacred song of the universe. As McGilchrist observes, “Music, like great works of tragedy, and like the rites of religion, acknowledges sorrow and redeems it by taking it up into something with a capacity to heal.” The irony is that our therapeutic culture cuts off at the soul the very capacity to be healed. “In our world, in place of sorrow or sadness, we have anger, resentment, and self-righteous indignation. Sorrow and sadness depend on connexion; anger, resentment and self-righteousness on alienation. Sorrow leads to insight; anger to blindness.”
Music, the kind Tolkien understood as the Great Work of Creation, a dramatic polyphony in which all play their part, rises from sacramental ontology. This sacred song thrives in the liturgy, demonstrating an understanding of symbol beyond empty rhetorical gesture, or barren concept. It is the analogical reach of being that is announced in beauty and the dance of prayer that initiates compassionate wonder, and healing. And this is very old, and ever new, the ora of the People of God.
Far from the scope of utilitarian ambitions, we arrive from and journey towards the Music. We are meant to sing the song of forgiveness, and victory over sin, the death, and diabolic deformations. There’s a linkage between the Novus Ordo and the Enlightenment, its linear haste and self-regard, the forgetting of Being, of sacred time, and love, really. It replaces the joy of the kingdom, where children play in the splendor of the Lord, with an unctuous, sentimental altruism that is ultimately atheistic, that’s the irony. And that is why a fella like the current pope panders to the servants of anti-Christ, and detests the Latin Mass.
But I do not wish to have emerged from anguish and fatigue to do nothing but lament. The glory of the Lord is not defeated by our collective blindness. And the faithful suffer the darkness in the greater darkness of the overwhelming radiance of the Divine. The kenotic work of the Spirit, the mirth of the Father, the Eucharistic joy is already triumphant. We endure this vale of tears, pilgrims on a road beset with shadows, yet called to ecstatic dance, the epektasis of the Eighth Day.
I can’t help but discern Providential care, that I should have come upon Richard J. Berry IV’s dissertation as I was completing work on a novel sequence that occupied me over the course of decades. Rick and I share an ardor for the gospel, its healing beauty, and interest in the ontological nature of symbolism, the depths and teleology opened up by analogia entis, and the unique roots of Christ’s mission that one discovers in Jewish liturgical worship.
I plan on writing something more substantial in future, but today, l simply wish to let folks know about Rick Berry’s Jewish Temple Theology and the Mystery of the Cross. As the subtitle indicates, Dr. Berry explicates a Christian theology of Atonement in the light of the two goats of Yom Kippur. This is more than a book form of a dissertation, or a typical academic treatise, though it certainly possesses scholarly rigor. We need to rediscover the bliss of the divine, and the courage of spiritual warfare. Berry’s theological vision is a creative, ambitious exploration of the ways of God. It nourishes a way of thinking about how we pray, and what happens in the Eucharist, and in our mission as the Church, that elucidates the true depth and breadth of God’s work of creation. Certainly, the goat for Azazel journeys even now amidst the diseased sterility of our virtual worlds in order to rescue souls.