Addendum: Lyrics from "My Fair Lady" apply here:Show me! Show me! Don't talk of love lasting through time.Make me no undying vow. Show me now!Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme!(Lyrics and music by Lerner and Loewe)
Don't waste my time, Show me!
And even when Wilder bases a play (or its title anyway) on an overtly religious text, “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead”—from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer for burial at sea—he challenges conventional piety. The dead, in a clear precursor of Our Town, lose their personalities at the Last Judgment. The Empress reflects:
We still cling obstinately to our identity, as though there were something valuable in it. This very moment I feel relics of pleasure in the fact that I am myself and no one else. Yet in a moment, if there is a moment, we shall all be reduced to our quintessential matter, and you, Mr. Nissem, will be exactly indistinguishable from me. God himself will not be able to tell the Empress of Newfoundland from the Reverend Dr. Cosroe. (CP, 39)
The souls are "panic-stricken." This does not mean that the collection as a whole denies an afterlife: the plays of Malchus and Childe Roland imply the immortality of the individual soul. Nor is the idea that the soul dissolves into the cosmos a particularly new one. Edgar Allan Poe in Eureka (1848) rhapsodizes about just such an event: “Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.”65 That is, the universe, both man and matter, is the diffused God, and God will cyclically reunite in one supreme consciousness.
Nevertheless, it is a painful idea for many.Tennyson is horrified in In Memoriam to think that his dear friend A. H. H. might be swallowed up in some oversoul: “Remerging in the general Soul / Is faith as vague as all unsweet” (Section 47). And the great Catholic existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, whose work Wilder knew, dismissed the entire idea: “All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile.”66 “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead” may well provoke religious meditation, but it is not of a comforting sort. Of course, if the world is only material, then the ego is extinguished in death. But this playlet suggests that even if the world is not reducible to the material, the ego may still be extinguished
(--pp.25-26 Thornton Wilder & Amos Wilder, Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America, by Christopher J. Wheatley, University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN.) http://www3.undpress.nd.edu/excerpts/P01489-ex.pdfHeidegger said that language is the house of being. Words, then, might form rooms, phrases sketch horizons of dwelling possibilities for our future
"On Sunday afternoon, March 6th, [2011] at the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado, Colorado 9/11 Visibility hosted a debate between Richard Gage, AIA (American Institute of Architects), and Chris Mohr, Denver investigative journalist and nondenominational minister. This is the audo of that historic debate."http://visibility911.libsyn.com/9-11-wtc-debate-collapse-by-fire-or-explosive-controlled-demolition
All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.
(--PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE, In Praise of Rareness, “The more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs.” -- Christian Wiman) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178842
from One Time
The need for guns relies on the need to forget our true relationship to one another. It is easier to kill another out of hatred or fear than it is to say "I hate you!" and let it go at that. Or: "I am afraid of you." and let that sink in to everyone in hearing proximity. It would mean we are available to what we really feel.by Christian Wiman2. 2047 Grace Street
But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God's being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing emerges,
into which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there were no night in which it had not been. (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21964#sthash.G4vjG75A.dpuf )
We come up against a notion here which seems to me of capital importance but for which it is difficult to find an idiomatic English equivalent—at least neither I, nor the English translator of my previous work, Being and Having, managed to do so. The French terms I use are disponibilité and indisponibilité. Literally, in English, one would render these as availability and unavailability, but it might sound more natural if one spoke of handiness and unhandiness, the basic idea being that of having or not having, in a given contingency, one’s resources to hand or at hand. The self-centred person, in this sense, is unhandy; I mean that he remains incapable of responding to calls made upon him by life, and I am not thinking merely of the appeals for help that may be made to him by the unfortunate. I mean rather that, over a much wider field, he will be incapable of sympathizing with other people, or even of imagining their situation. He remains shut up in himself, in the petty circle of his private experience, which forms a kind of hard shell round him that he is incapable of breaking through. He is unhandy from his own point of view and unavailable from the point of view of others.(--in Quantum Est In Rebus Inane, Philosophy, Literature, Logic, Language, and Orthodoxyhttp://kellydeanjolley.com/2011/07/18/212/)I eat segments from grapefruit given Saskia by folks she liked so much staying at Mary House in Spencer near Trappist Monastery.
If you do wrong and get beaten for it, what credit can you claim? But if you put up with suffering for doing what is right, this is acceptable in God’s eyes.It was for this you were called, since Christ suffered for you in just this way and left you an example, to have you follow in his footsteps. He did no wrong; no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was insulted, he returned no insult. When he was made to suffer, he did not counter with threats. Instead, he delivered himself up to the One who judges justly. In his own body he brought your sins to the cross, so that all of us, dead to sin, could live in accord with God’s will. By his wounds you were healed. At one time you were straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd, the guardian of your souls.
(--From the first letter of the apostle Peter 2:11-25, Christians are strangers in this world; ttp://divineoffice.org)It is often mysterious what to think Peter or anyone else means by their words about "Christ" or "God." Time over Holy Week in stronghold of theological and liturgical catholic atmosphere deepens this mysterious metaphoric milieu of thought.
These Poems, She Said
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said….
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
(--Poem by Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said”)
In the eyes of many, hope may of course boil down to wishful thinking. [Gabriel] Marcel readily concedes that this happens many times, perhaps most of the time. Can hope escape this criticism? The answer is provided by the distinction between “hoping” and “hoping that. . . .” Genuine hope is unconditional hope. Genuine hope belongs to the field of “being” rather than “having” (another of Marcel’s favorite distinctions): the person who, “without any condition, without limitation, lives in absolute trust, shall experience the safety of ‘being’ or safety in ‘being,’ rather than the radical insecurity of ‘having.’” Absolute hope, beyond any condition and any image or representation, is interpreted by Marcel as the creature’s response to the infinite Being or even the absolute Thou—and here, of course, most if not all Buddhists will beg to differ.But we may be prepared to hear him when he observes: “Nobody can experience the lightness of living in hope unless he/she be fully liberated from the bonds of possession(s).” He adds, “We remain open to hope, even in a small way, provided there still are some cracks or chinks in the armor of possession, the armor of ‘having,’ built around us.” There is thus a fundamental distinction between hope and expectation, between hope and desire, between hope and self-centeredness. Hope—this is Marcel’s conclusion and last word—hope essentially is disponibilité (being or keeping oneself available, open, receptive).
(--from, "In Hope against Hope" A Christian Meditation in the Light of Buddhism, by Jacques Scheuer, In Monastic Interreligious Dialogue) http://www.dimmid.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B5A5193BF-26B2-4FC1-A743-BC9574428D76%7DRegarding the hopeless with fond emptiness is odd comfort. Sitting in Merton Retreat this Easter Tuesday after walking vacated Snow Bowl where remnant melting mountainside holds sliding dusk silence in its fading tracks.
Prayer is misunderstood. It's not meant to get you anything or get you anywhere.Expectations involve calculation, management, and—most of the time without our being aware of it (avidyâ)—the double-bind of desire: a relation of both controlling power and passive dependence between subject and object. Desire also includes a “spatialization” of time. All this is rather obvious in the question of the disciples after the resurrection of Jesus: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1,6-7). No answer thus, except perhaps the following: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (1,8). In order to realize that their question is meaningless, that it has no genuine object, the disciples will need a good forty or fifty days—or is it forty years, or forty kalpas?Hope seems quite close to the attitude of mu-shotoku: without expectation, without aim or intended object. Is it then a shift from object to subject? Or is it rather the attitude or quality of being unconcerned about subject or object? One should perhaps say: there is hope but no hoping individual—in the same way one says: there is suffering, but no suffering subject. To hope is to remain in this pure openness. Such an understanding and practice of hope would, in a paradoxical way, come quite close to the Chan and Zen tradition of “great doubt” (dai-gi). From a Christian perspective, one would dare say that the true subject of hope is “He who comes,” He who, through his coming, makes hope possible, is the source of hope, opens a space for hope. This coming One is the “Deus semper maior” (E. Przywara), the ever greater Godhead. (Ibid)
"My God my bright abyss / into which all my longing will not go / I come to the edge of all I know / and believing nothing believe in this:"This.
(--final stanza of unfinished poem by Christian Wiman, recent editor of Poetry magazine)
"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." (Hobbes, from Leviathan)
